🚀 go-pugleaf

>>>>> On 16 Apr 92 09:21:25 GMT, stephen@estragon.uchicago.edu (Stephen P Spackman) said:
>>>>> In article <1992Apr15.201453.10255@newshost.lanl.gov> jlg@cochiti.lanl.gov (Jim Giles) writes:


Stephen> A language should not be restricted to a particular problem
Stephen> domain or domains. A good language is _necessarily_ a general
Stephen> purpose language.

Jim> Now we _really_ disagree.  I think that the `one size fits all'
Jim> language is impossible with the present technology and probably
Jim> always will be.  High-level languages _must_ decide on a target
Jim> user group and design for that problem domain or they will not be
Jim> high-level.

Stephen> This position is (pardon in advance) both defeatist and
Stephen> absurd! If we take this view we will end up in a world in
Stephen> which it is *not possible* to write a good, clear programme
Stephen> that involves text processing and floating point arithmetic,
Stephen> or....

i agree with jim.  a language that is very good at doing things in one
domain is necessarily not so good at other domains (eg, regexps are a
specialized language for string searching, they are good for just
about nothing else).  there are languages that are only somewhat
specialized towards a particular domain, and they are somewhat
applicable to other domains (eg snobol).  and there are languages that
are pretty much neutral wrt domain (eg lisp).

why is this true?  it seems that a language is good at a domain if it
does a lot of stuff from that domain automatically.  basically, you
want domain specific stuff baked in.  you might think this is bad, and
that such things should be provided with libraries, but this is a very
weak form of support.  could you do TeX with a library?  no.

is this defeatist?  no.  you just need a good way to create new
languages, and still have them communicate.
-- 
			conform
scott draves		deform
spot@cs.cmu.edu		explode