[Tfug] Language choices

[Stephen Hooper]

Why don't you look at Forth?

It is a dead language, but it is supposedly fairly easy to create an
"interpreter" for, is quite powerful (ala OpenPROM), and requires
little punctuation.

It is also rather flexible in that though there are standards, it is
up to you to follow them,  or implement them as you see fit.

The IPC thing would be a little more complicated, because it doesn't
really work that way... still maybe it would be useful for you...

I know there are a few companies that still use it for embedded
programming purposes.

On 10/27/06, Bexley Hall <bexley401 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> *Now*, what's your resource footprint look like
> while your <token> application is running?  Can
> you do this in 1G of RAM?  512M?  256MB?  64M?
> 16M??  How about *4*M?
>
> Sure, I have more than 4M available.  But, that
> memory has to support *lots* of applications
> running concurrently -- plus their "disk images",
> etc.
>
> > Ruby is clean, concise, well-designed, and best of
> > all, object-oriented from the ground up.  It
> supports
> > blocks and closures.  It's designed to follow the
> > principle of least surprise, and it reads
> > very easily in english-like syntax (even though it
> > was originally written by guy from Japan).
>
> *Most* OO langages "read" terribly!  Lots of
> superfluous punctuation mandated by the object
> model (e.g., object.method).  And, all sorts of
> oddball operators (e.g., &, ->, @, etc.).
>
> Could you read your code to a *secretary* (non
> computer literate) easily?
>
> E.g., if you discount parens, LISP is quite readable
> (though if you discard the parens, what the hell
> is left?? :> ).  OTOH, C++, Java, etc. have tons
> of punctuation sprinkled throughout.  It seems
> like newer languages rely heavily on punctuation.
> (contrast with something like COBOL  :>  )
>
> > Theres a ton of 3rd-party libraries to
> > support it, and an easy mechanism to auto-download
> > them (RubyGems).
>
> Not important for me.  :>  Unless, perhaps, they have
> libraries to control motors, scan barcodes, etc.  :)
>
> > You get the best of all worlds.
>
> What about support for variable precision math?
> Are there hooks for IPC built into the language?
> (e.g., Limbo, REXX, etc.)  Or, does it rely on
> library support for this?
>
> I'll have to look through the ruby package on my
> NBSD box to see if there are "features" I could
> discard to tweek the syntax -- or, if it is
> hopelessly tied to the language definition
> itself.  Maybe I'll run my proposed test (to
> check resource footprint).  I'm not very
> optimistic... :<
>
> Thanks!
> --don