On 4/24/07, Gregory Seidman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Tue, Apr 24, 2007 at 10:49:49AM +0300, Ilya Sher wrote:
> Robert Lee wrote:
> [snip]
> > Counterwish #2: Dump VimScript and replace it with EMCAScript (maybe
> > using SpiderMonkey) so that people don't need to learn a new language
> If I understand you correctly, you assume that
> ECMAScript is the most popular language among
> the people that wish to customize VIM. How
> do you know the assumption is right?
> [snip]
Actually, I like the proposal for two entirely different reasons:
1) the language specification comes from an international standards body
So? In what way does this make it a good language? In what way does
this make it a good language to extend Vim with? Anyone can write a
standard. It doesn't mean that it's good or what is being
standardized will be, either.
2) there are lots of people working on efficient implementations, at least
two of which are open source (SpiderMonkey and Adobe's Tamarin, though
there seem to be some plans to convert SpiderMonkey to use Tamarin)
SpiderMonkey is a terribly inefficient implementation, which is why
Tamarin will be used in future versions of Gecko. And I wouldn't say
that efficiency is the primary concern of a language/runtime engine to
use for Vim.
It is looking more and more like the world of scripting languages for
application extension (as opposed to standalone scripting languages) is
converging on ECMAScript and Lua, particularly for interactive apps.
I'm sure Microsoft agrees with this sentiment.
There's a lot to be said for following a path that leads to interoperability and
code reuse.
Yeah, follow-the-leader is everyone's favorite game. And just look at
all the libraries for both these languages. Application extension may
sometimes be restricted to the domain of the actual application, but
having an abundance of libraries certainly opens up for more
interesting possibilities.
I would argue that international standardization lends
ECMAScript an edge over Lua, incidentally.
Lua is standardized in the sense that it has only one implementation.
nikolai
