Usually BASIC is put forward as a bare minmum language. And as I now reflect, traditional Basic does have some of the same issues as M regarding globally-scoped variables. But Basic has been revamped so that today enterprise applications can be written in it.
My biggest beefs with M would be the issue of variable scoping, allowance of single letter commands leading to code that is very difficult for newcomers to read, and limitation to 8 characters in variable names etc (made worse by the need for namespacing.) I know that this last point has been fixed in Cache' and GT.M, but is still not used in the VA. And this is before talking about OO ability found in newer languages. Kevin On 1/15/06, Gregory Woodhouse <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Jan 15, 2006, at 8:30 AM, James Gray wrote: > > > What is so horrible about the M language definition? > > > > Jim > > What? Do you want a list? > > The shortcomings of the language definition shouldn't obscure the > good points of the language, but in the past, when I've tried to > point to problems with the language, I would begin to wonder if I was > going to need a surgeon to reattach my head to my neck. More > seriously, a formal semantics and a standard library (for I/O and the > like) would be a good start. > > === > Gregory Woodhouse > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > "You can't win if you don't finish the race." > --Richard Petty > > > > > > ------------------------------------------------------- > This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Do you grep through log files > for problems? Stop! Download the new AJAX search engine that makes > searching your log files as easy as surfing the web. DOWNLOAD SPLUNK! > http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=7637&alloc_id=16865&op=click > _______________________________________________ > Hardhats-members mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/hardhats-members > ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Do you grep through log files for problems? Stop! Download the new AJAX search engine that makes searching your log files as easy as surfing the web. DOWNLOAD SPLUNK! http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_idv37&alloc_id865&op=click _______________________________________________ Hardhats-members mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/hardhats-members
