Hi Elan, 19-Feb-2000 you wrote:
>>Do you mean the Beta programming language,
>Yes.
Cool! I've got to tell my study mates about that ;-)
[...]
>>And before I get your reply, I still think I'm
>>right on that one ;-) )
>Yikes. I didn't know Beta was *that* unknown. I actually printed out and
Perhaps it isn't. But as it's mainly developed here in Aarhus, we (the poor
students) always felt like the only reason we were forced to writing Beta
using the very, very poor development tools ("poor" regarding stability and
speed, mainly...) was that the developers wanted some testers.
>studied the accompanying manuals. I especially like the idea of fragments.
Yup. Fragments and the way that methods can interact with "overriding methods"
is very smart. And the pattern abstraction mechanism, though it sometimes
seems a bit cumbersome.
>It provides some interesting added flexibility. I also found the arrow
>notation very intuitive and appealing. The only thing that stopped from
Hmmm, I still prefer REBOL's ":" or C's "=", but that's probably a habit.
>actually using Beta beyond just entering all the examples from the manuals
>was the fact that the MS Windows GUI support was rather weak (at the time
>it relied on Tcl/Tk, if I remember correctly.) The kind of software I was
I think they have done major things regarding Windows GUI in the meantime.
[...]
>At some point I remember someone announced that they were a implementing a
>constraint sub system for Beta.
That wouldn't surprise me. Beta acts as a kind of crash test dummy for a lot
of (sometimes strange) ideas the students and professors get.
But what I hate most about Beta is the compiler. The executables are far too
big (3-4 MB's for medium-sized projects is not a peculiar sight when using
Beta), though apparently somebody is working on that one. But still, there
are many other programming languages I would prefer for practical use instead
of Beta.
Anyway, I just wanted to tell you that I found it interesting that you knew
about Beta, too ;-)
Kind regards,
--
Ole Friis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
"Ignorance is bliss"
(Cypher, The Matrix)
