On Sat, 20 Oct 2001 00:00, Jose Alberto Fernandez wrote: > From: "Stefan Bodewig" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > > On Fri, 19 Oct 2001, Peter Donald <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > However before we edecide on this we first need to discuss scoping > > > of properties because this will have a direct impact on our > > > structure. > > > > True, we can try that in parallel ... > > Although I do not a problem with discussing scoping in parallel, I see no > need to mix this two issues. <property> is not the only thing that can be > declared outside targets today.
That is only because of limitations of ant engine in current form. In the future I can not see the need for *def to be outside targets. <*def> will be relegated to people who want to build types inside their build file and then imediately use them. > As ANT gets wider use, others will appear. Actually I can see it shrinking ... well except for addition of <if/> if that ever gets allowed ;) > The success and flexibility of any artificial language (and ANT is a > language) depends on the orthogonality of the concepts it has, the least > special cases the best. We need to apply well knows language design > principles to ANT. Success of a language depends on a number of factors; expressability, simplicity and verbosity being key players. And it is also relatively domain/user specific. Compare perl programmers and VB programmers and java programmers. Each language has different strengths and weaknesses and tend to draw different sorts of peeps. We should be catering for the java style mentality (ie focus on simplicity and verbostiy) because thats our main audience. -- Cheers, Pete -------------------------------------------------------------- "Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out, but that is not the reason we are doing it" -- Richard Feynman --------------------------------------------------------------
