>I had accidentally sent a message only to DeRobertis
>that proposed we use a modular plugin like system
>for the specific syntax of the interpreter.
>
>The specific advantage I saw was we could create
>a GermanTalk, and a FrenchTalk, along with an
>AmericanTalk. For the hard core people a CTalk,
>and a C++Talk could be created.
Michael,
I see not much of a problem in creating some sort of byte-code that could
be converted into a FrenchTalk, GermanTalk or whatever. But I think making
a C/C++ talk or things like that wouldn't work that well, because C is much
more like an assembler, and not as high-level as xTalk is.
>We of course would only maintain the ones we
>used and let others maintain the ones they care about.
As always, this is the way to go. Don't bother with features you don't
need, but design the program in a way that others who need them can add
them.
>The reason I recommend this is the opportunity to
>use one's native language to program in makes for
>increased productivity.
Certainly. Though English is much easier to approximate in a scripting
language than e.g. German. In German you'd have lots of synonyms to allow
for the cases, or you'd have to program a real German grammar into it --
and that's a thing computational linguists have been trying to write for
years.
As to how to convert between different languages -- this will surely not
be as hard if we get the above sorted out, we'd probably need to keep some
additional information like what case goes with what parameter to a
built-in command, but this all lies in the realm of the doable.
Another advantage of the byte codes is that we could save only the byte
codes to a standalone, thus making it harder to hack them by simply using a
text editor. Of course, this'd again encourage proprietary solutions. But
it would certainly decrease disk-space requirements of standalones and
cause a speed-up since tokenizing wouldn't be necessary anymore.
Cheers,
-- M. Uli Kusterer
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