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From: goer@quads.uchicago.edu (Richard L. Goerwitz)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Survey Results : Perl vs Icon vs .... (> 500 lines)
Message-ID: <1991Apr8.201559.6408@midway.uchicago.edu>
Date: 8 Apr 91 20:15:59 GMT
References: <3252@charon.cwi.nl> <1991Apr3.151153.3447@midway.uchicago.edu> <3282@charon.cwi.nl>
Sender: goer@midway.uchicago.edu (Richard L. Goerwitz)
Distribution: comp
Organization: University of Chicago
Lines: 32

In article <3282@charon.cwi.nl> guido@cwi.nl (Guido van Rossum) writes:

>I don't really want to engage in "mine is longer than yours" contests,
>but just for the record: Python is out only two months now and has
>already been ported to all of the Unix platforms you mention (plus
>hpux) and some of the micro ones (Mac, MS-DOS, Atari ST).

That's good news.

>Disclaimer: maybe I seem stubborn on this point, but I have worked on
>a language project where OS independence was considered so important
>that the language didn't even have a primitive to open a file and read
>data from it within a program.  The language didn't become a terrible
>success, even though it had other properties that made it a big leap
>forward from other languages...

You're not being overly stubborn.  One of the few complaints I see about
Icon is that it doesn't let you get close enough to the operating sys to
do anything resembling a commercially viable production piece of software.
In fact, Icon does let you do this, but only by extending the run-time
system in nonportable ways.  Apparently linking C functions will be much
easier once the compiler comes into use.  There is still some question,
though, about how large compiled executables will be.

I have not looked into Python, and it seems that this ought to be added
to my list of things to do.

-Richard (goer@sophist.uchicago.edu)
-- 

   -Richard L. Goerwitz              goer%sophist@uchicago.bitnet
   goer@sophist.uchicago.edu         rutgers!oddjob!gide!sophist!goer