Bill- Friday, December 2, 2005, 12:01:56 PM, you wrote:
I'm with you most of the way on this. I'd love to have a way to implement my own keywords into my stacks. And then distribute libraries that extend xtalk with them. Problem 1: most other languages that allow this are adopting namespace conventions to deal with conflicting libraries. That's where you start having to pick up the dot-notation or something similar, and veering away from the near-natural-language approach of xtalk. Problem 2: It's not just codesize bloat that you have to deal with when extending the language, it's also slowing down the basic parsing engine having to deal with more and more stuff. I'd really like to avoid slowing down one of my stacks that doesn't use a function that someone else wanted included. Problem 3: <warning - heresy follows> there's no such thing as "self-documenting, human-readable code". Sorry - that's the way it is. Xtalk comes pretty close, though. Even comes pretty close to "human-thinkable". Problem 4: creeping featureitis New things *do* get added to xtalk. But very slowly, and after much deliberation. And I like it that way. It's hard to retract something once you've added it to a language. I think the point at which you move something from a library into the core functionality needs to be looked at very cautiously, and runrev has, so far, exhibited a lot of caution in this respect (to the point of ignoring several of my bug report enhancement requests). -- -Mark Wieder [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [email protected] Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
