I agree this should not become a battle, and I know other readers will wonder why I'm about to fire another round if I'm against the war :^).
But, if we can't even agree on basic definitions of fundametal terminology, how can we define the requirements for Ant, and from there, the design? I think we need some shared level of understanding of what all these words mean, or we could be bogged down in a quagmire of discussion for weeks because we aren't communicating on the same terms. If we use "declarative language' differently, and 'module' differently, and .... etc, etc, etc... So, with that caveat in mind ... >From "The Free Online Dictionary of Computing (http://foldoc.doc.ic.ac.uk/) edited by Denis Howe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>." declarative language ============== A general term for a relational language or a functional language, as opposed to an imperative language. Imperative (or procedural) languages specify explicit sequences of steps to follow to produce a result, while declarative languages describe relationships between variables in terms of functions or inference rules and the language executor (interpreter or compiler) applies some fixed algorithm to these relations to produce a result. The most common examples of declarative languages are logic programming languages such as Prolog and functional languages like Haskell. " In fact, it's hard to do a web search on "declarative language" and not find 'prolog' part of the same hit. Jose Alberto Fernandez wrote: > Well, I did not want to start the battle of the technicalities but I think > we need to make some things clear. > > Prolog is NOT a declarative programming language. < SNIP > > That is what declarative boils down to, freedom for the execution engine to > be implemented in whatever way it wants. > And conversely, the input text, i.e. the language, that the engine executes does not have any EXPLICT sequencing of steps or branching. All of which is what declarative languages are about - an input text that declares the desired outcome, and an execution engine that makes it so...
