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From: ralphw@ius3.ius.cs.cmu.edu (Ralph Hyre)
Newsgroups: comp.arch,comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Universal OS & universal language
Message-ID: <1596@pt.cs.cmu.edu>
Date: 4 May 88 15:13:15 GMT
References: <2845@mmintl.UUCP> <1543@hubcap.UUCP> <768@l.cc.purdue.edu> <1705@alliant.Alliant.COM>
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Organization: Carnegie-Mellon University, CS/RI
Lines: 42
Keywords: Babel-II, programming environment
Summary: put the complexity in the programming environment
Followup-to:comp.lang.misc


[followups directed to comp.lang.misc, where they belong]
In article <1705@alliant.Alliant.COM> steckel@alliant.UUCP (Geoff Steckel) writes:
>In article <762@l.cc.purdue.edu> cik@l.cc.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin) writes:
>>> >The language ... should ... try to include it _all_.
>
>In article <768@l.cc.purdue.edu> cik@l.cc.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin) writes:
>
>>And they must realize that the resulting system ... must be easily
>> extensible.  This means that the user must be able to use notation
>> which he considers easy to read,
>I will argue that extensible languages lead to fairly large problems...
>"personal taste" rears its head.  The more a language needs extending,
>the more the resultant language-prime becomes unintelligible to the next
>reader.

Assuming you make extensions within the basic syntax of the language,
I believe that documentation of the language concepts and philosophy
is sufficient to smooth over most problems caused by differences.

My model of the 'programming environment of the future' includes a
programming assistant, which will transliterate your code into other
language.  This is how Kyoto Common Lisp works, it gets compiled into C. 
I doubt that the output is meant for humans, though, so there's still some
technology to devlop.  

You might imagine using smalltalk to do some user-interface prototyping,
lisp or prolog to write some inference engines, and C to do some time-critical
crunching.  If you want to deliver a version completely written in C, just
invoke the smalltalk->lisp and lisp->C translators on it.  [This might be
an advantage if you want to sell C 'source code' to your customers, but want
them to have a hard time deciphering it so you retain your competetive edge.]

Not easy to think about implementing this.

A simpler alternative, of course, is to specify inter-language interfaces
For example, most modern Unix lisps have a way of calling routines in Unix 
object modules.
-- 
					- Ralph W. Hyre, Jr.

Internet: ralphw@ius2.cs.cmu.edu    Phone:(412)268-{2847,3275} CMU-{BUGS,DARK}
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