On Dec 6, 2007, at 2:35 AM, Waldemar Kornewald wrote:
On Dec 6, 2007 1:48 AM, Joshua Gargus <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Is it correct that we'll have a Lisp-like syntax at the lowest level
and a Smalltalk-like syntax above (with some syntax sugar like in
eToys?)?
(Leaving aside whether eToys should be considered syntactic sugar on
top of Smalltalk, any more than C is syntactic sugar on assembler...)
Hehe. :)
Since we don't know what the eToys-inspired language will be like I
expressed it that way. What purpose will the eToys-inspired language
have? Will it be primarily for children or will it be more
general-purpose like Smalltalk?
Will most of the system be implemented in that eToys-inspired
language?
In which language will the whole system be implemented such that it'll
only be about 20K lines?
It will be implemented in a variety of domain-specific languages. For
example, the code for networking, graphics, and defining new syntaxes
might be written in different languages.
If I want to write some fancy peer-to-peer system, Smalltalk or Python
are not much better than C. What I really want is something like P2 (http://p2.berkeley.intel-research.net/
) that reduces the amount of code to write by a factor of 100.
As I understand it, one of the big goals of the project is that a
Smalltalk-like object can trivially send messages to objects
generated-
by/coded-in JavaScript. You can use any language that you want, yet
still have perfectly convenient access to libraries written in other,
more popular, languages.
What bothers me more is that if the lower-level language is based on
Smalltalk syntax then how are the other languages going to easily and
comfortably interface with that syntax? It'll probably have to look
like a mixture, similar to Objective C.
This statement is untrue, and reveals a misconception that explains
your determination to get a solid answer about what the syntax will
look like. Once you're past the misconception, you will understand
that Bert was not being equivocal when he said "we do not pick any
particular syntax at this point in time".
.NET might provide a useful analogy. You can write an application in
many different languages that target the CLR (C#, Python, OCaml), and
since they all use the same underlying bytecodes and object
representation, you can write code in one language that will send a
message to an object written in another language even though the
syntax of the two languages have very little in common. Very roughly
(sorry Ian), you can think of OLA as .NET without the VM.
Ian's papers (particularly http://vpri.org/pdf/colas_wp_RN-2006-001-a.pdf
and http://vpri.org/pdf/obj_mod_RN-2006-003-a.pdf) describe clearly
how this is implemented.
Josh
Bye,
Waldemar Kornewald
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