Jim Self wrote:
> Thomas Beale wrote:
> >Andrew po-jung Ho wrote:
> >> Horst, it doesn't matter how awesome Eiffel is or whether it is or is not
> a fully fledged compilable OO language. There are lots of compilable, full
> OO languages in the year 2000.
> >
> >Name one (no university languages allowed). Then let's talk about "full
> OO".
>
> Smalltalk.
> http://www.squeak.org
> http://www.pocketsmalltalk.
dammit! Someone knew the answer. Ok, ok. But is anyone here interested in using
Smalltalk? (I'll admit my fear of it comes from a background in real-time
industrial control systems where the thought of all that stuff happening at
runtime with no compiler checking was just a bit too much. One glitch and your
rail system kills 50 people....)
> I recently ran across a couple of Open Source implementations of Smalltalk
> that I find absolutely intriguing, partly because both are at least
> partially compiled and capable of running on PDA's. Squeak has some
> similarity to SmallEiffel and ISE in that it compiles itself to C as needed.
> I plan to look at them in detail either in my spare time or after I move our
> MUMPS based HIS onto a fully Open Source MUMPS platform, whichever comes
> first. ;-)
>
> >Eiffel/GEHR is not
> >trying to be elitist; it is trying to inject real quality into systems
> >which can indeed be used by everyone.
>
> Which brings us back to GT.M and VistA... ;-)
> Perhaps the strongest feature of GT.M appears to be its proven flexible high
> performance scalable database engine designed for 24x365 operation. It
> provides a simple C level interface which could be easily accessed from
> Eiffel/GEHR. One possibility that would provide is direct access to VistA
> data and metadata from GEHR and vice versa. That could benefit both VistA
> and GEHR.
Actually I've been meaning to expose my ignorance about this, and get this
information. If we can write a database binding to Mumps from GEHR, we could be
somewhere useful. But I am not interesting in the M language, although if we
just have to write a bit to make the binding work, then no problem.
> I read it when the topic hit this list, as I am sure did many others who had
> been favorably impressed with your arguments for Eiffel. It left an
> indelible impression. The damage is deep. People must read it themselves.
Too bad: one opinion article versus over 10 years of practitioners' experiences
and language improvements.
But let's talk more about GT.M (probably offline).
- thomas beale
