On Sat, Sep 05, 2009 at 07:22:37AM -0400, Akshat Kumar wrote:
> "Programming languages are just tools, after all."
>
> Considering that Plan 9 has only two inherent languages,
> and its users often push for work to be done in only those,
> what is the Plan 9 perspective of languages and tools in
> relation to each other?
I don't know for "the Plan 9 perspective" and have no authority to talk
"for Plan 9", but since almost all interpreters or compilers are written
in C, whether completely or the bootstapping procedure (a C core that is
able to interpret a subset of the language to generate a binary for the
non optimized version of a complete compiler etc.), there are all the
tools as long as there is a C compiler for the machine.
The remaining is, IMHO, user stuff: one has all tools needed to
customize.
The only "lack" in C is perhaps defined full control for
arithmetic/calculus. That's probably why FORTRAN is still here and has
still its strength in this area.
Just my 2 centimes,
--
Thierry Laronde (Alceste) <tlaronde +AT+ polynum +dot+ com>
http://www.kergis.com/
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