On Mon, May 12, 2014 at 10:18:47AM -0400, Matthias Felleisen wrote: > > On May 12, 2014, at 3:56 AM, Konrad Hinsen <konrad.hin...@fastmail.net> wrote: > > > Note however that I didn't look at performance, which is not > > really important for most of what I do. > > > In hindsight that is obvious from your use of Python :-) It should > have clicked in me, but I am just so used to think "scientific > computation ~ simulations of nuclear bombs, aircraft wings, oil > platforms, and such" and that's when performance is the overriding > concern. > > > > I agree that the term "macro" should be banned, but I don't think I > > can contribute much to that. > > > You can, and everyone else on this list can: > > do not use the word 'macro' ever again. > > Period. > > > > ... my point about the roots of the languages in academic research > > is valid nevertheless. I'd like to see more of this. > > > You are absolutely correct and we should emphasize this idea > on our web pages a lot more. > > > > Making languages with different garbage > > collectors work together is such a pain that I am not very motivated > > to try. I guess this problem will ensure the survival of C for many > > years to come. > > > A student of mine tried twice to integrate Python with Racket > some 10, 12 years ago. Painful indeed, and your conclusion is > correct.
The world needs a good, flexible, exact garbage collector that can be used by a variety of languages. Ideally, its interface to the rest of the world should admit of implementations that are just stop-and-collect, or stop-and-copy, or multicore for speed, or even concurrent with the mutator. And then all those languages can share it. -- hendrik ____________________ Racket Users list: http://lists.racket-lang.org/users
