On Sat, 20 Oct 2001 12:34, Jose Alberto Fernandez wrote: > Well, datatype instances are not properties (at least not in ANT1).
Ant1 does not do a lot of things. We voted to unify in ANt2 them last round... > Yes you > can say that in ANT2 they will be. I could also say that <target> > declarations can be processed by an ANT task (a quite simple thing to do). However if you recall last round we -1'ed the idea of having targets as tasks... > > 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. > > Orthogonality is one of the mayor design features of succesful languages. not really. It is a side effect from other decisions. It is rare that an aspect is independent of other aspects and when making design decisions it is often the case that a set of related aspects for a higher order "aspect" that is othogonal to other higher order "aspect"s in system but the component aspects are rarely othogonal to each other except in exceptional circumstances. > In the particular case of Java which is our taget audience, most features > of the language are expresses in the language itself. They do not use some > secret API not available to user defined code. The String, Class, IO > libraries, etc. Are written in Java and use just the same stuff available > to user code. To define features that are not expressible or usable on user > difine code is to so you are advocating we don't have any task at top level and instead require an init style target ? -- Cheers, Pete The big mistake that men make is that when they turn thirteen or fourteen and all of a sudden they've reached puberty, they believe that they like women. Actually, you're just horny. It doesn't mean you like women any more at twenty-one than you did at ten. --Jules Feiffer (cartoonist)
