>>Alain: Are there any other dev environments >>that a new Mac programmer should know about ? Garry Roseman: BETA. <http://www.mjolner.com> Alain: Wow! I am impressed. Those northern europeans deservedly have an outstanding reputation for great design. I checked out the site. Read and immediately understood all of the code examples provided. > Garry: Beta is a language for expressing a > computationas a representation of the > problem domain in terms of patterns. Alain: It is unclear to me what kind of pattern-matching is going on in BETA, it is evidently a very powerful yet simple formalism that lends itself well to meta-level endomorphic (HFS-like) system design. > Garry: Patterns are much like, indeed "are" > objects, but patterns are completely general > computational objects in that a pattern can > represent a procedure, a function, an object, > an exception, a coroutine, or anything that > I have ever "programmed". Alain: What I gather from this is that they have generalized the concept of a pattern, so as to include programming constructs and data-structures. Not just string pattern-matching (GREP) like Perl is so reputed for. It strikes me as the ideal formalism for syntax interpretation (eg. the interpreter). > Garry: It was expensive for years but in > November Mjolner released the entire system > (125 megabytes) to be used freely for > commercial or noncommercial development. Alain: How wonderful! Is it officially open source ? > Garry: It is available for > PowerMac, Windows, and Unix. Alain: Truly wonderful! > Garry: It includes an IDE that allows you to > jump back and forth between a template editor > and a UML graphic model (the program is kept > as an abstract syntax tree and the system can > reverse engineer code from the AST into a diagram > or compile either code or diagram into the AST. Alain: Bi-directional representation of code, between a syntaxical representation (text) and a graphical one? If so, I am really impressed. > Garry: I haven't played much with the IDE > except to know that it works. Alain: Number one criteria in my book. > Garry: I use the Beta compiler with MPW. > It supports the Mac toolbox and includes > a cross-platform graphics library. Alain: Could we ask for any better ? :) > Garry: BETA is the successor to Simula; > Nygaard was instrumental in designing it. > It is used for some industrial projects > in the Nordic countries. Alain: A programmer friend of mine used to rave about Simula. Never used it myself though. > Garry: It has a pretty high WOW factor > if you like clean design > and outside-the-box thinking. Alain: What a breath of fresh air this expose of yours has been. There is hope for computing-kind after all! __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Talk to your friends online with Yahoo! Messenger. http://im.yahoo.com
