Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!rice!titan!preston
From: preston@titan.rice.edu (Preston Briggs)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Anyone want to design a language?
Message-ID: <5184@brazos.Rice.edu>
Date: 22 Feb 90 06:20:27 GMT
References: <4489:05:14:19@stealth.acf.nyu.edu> <14242@lambda.UUCP> <24349:04:46:47@stealth.acf.nyu.edu>
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Organization: Rice University, Houston
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In article <24349:04:46:47@stealth.acf.nyu.edu> brnstnd@stealth.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein) writes:
>Given the lack of any macro facility, they did fine. They would have
>done much better to provide a standard method to define new control
>structures, then reduced the standard set to three or four with no
>special cases.

Consider perhaps the Scheme ideal of lambda, if, call, set!, and catch
as a base, then adding all the rest of the control structure with macros.

>> In languages with recursive data types, direct dynamic memory (like 
>Oh, yeah! In a language with tasks, automatic threading, and message
>passing, I've never seen the need for semaphores _AT_ALL_!! C'mon, be
>serious.

It's not such a bad point.  ML (and other languages) with recursive data
types manage very nicely without (explicit) pointers.  Heap allocated data
is probably needed, but automatic type coercions aren't.

So, how about garbage collection?