Tcl (was Re: [oclug] UNIX philosophy (was Re: vim rulez...))

[Francis Pinteric]

--- "Michael P. Soulier" <msoulier at storm.ca> wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 19, 2001 at 06:05:54AM -0700, Francis Pinteric wrote:
> > 
> > As for pure text being ancient ... that strikes at the heart of
> the
> > Unix portability philosophy. Text and text only.
> 
[snip] 
>     If it can't handle binary, then I can't always use it. Not a
> big deal, but
> an issue nonetheless. 
> 
>     Mike
> 

Yes, I know. The debate itself is as ancient as the text. Sure,
there's a need because that's what you've got. There are all sorts of
reasons why things are the way they are.

As far as the languages go, I don't really like the bytecode approach
really. Sure it's more portable in that when you want to move a
language implementation to another machine all you need to do is
write the interpreter for it. But that gives you huge performance
its, even though it's still faster than running the yacc parser all
the time. Yacc and bison are pretty slow when you want to run them in
this manner.

I prefer compiled languages myself, but the downside is that it's
harder to port to new platforms. GNU's got the MDL and second pass
that several compilers use (like C, C++, Ada, Fortran and Pascal).

Ah well, not a perfect world yet. We must all continue to work
towards it though, promoting the good and avoiding (and daemonizing)
the evil.

>>>--fja->

=====
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."
 -- Alan Kay

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Auctions - buy the things you want at great prices
http://auctions.yahoo.com/