🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <BEVAN.91Mar5123224@tiger.cs.man.ac.uk> bevan@cs.man.ac.uk (Stephen J Bevan) writes:
>   + Does the language have any arbitrary limits? e.g. the length of a
>     line ... etc.

*Languages* rarely set arbitrary (semantic) limits. I regularly write
text-processing utilities in C that accept lines of any length. All the
GNU utilities do too.

Yes, all of the languages in question were designed for text processing,
and have the unrestricted builtins you want.

>   + How fast is it?  This can be compared to whatever you like, but each
>     other preferably.  I'm not really interested if XXX is only, X%
>     quicker than YYY on average (whatever that maybe).

All these languages are interpreters and hence are relatively slow. The
exact answer depends on your application.

>   + Does it give `reasonable' error messages?  i.e. something better
>     than the equivalent of `awk bailing out on line X'.

I have no idea what you mean by ``reasonable.''

>   + Does it have a debugger?  If not, are there any extra facilities
>     for debuggging above and beyond simply inserting `printf' (change
>     as appropriate) statements.

Perl does. I haven't seen one for Icon, and I'm not yet familiar enough
with the Python package.

>   + Does it allow conditional interpretation/compilation? i.e.
>     anything like +FEATURE in Lisp or #ifdef FEATURE/#endif in C.

Who cares? We're talking about interpreters.

---Dan