Subject: Re: Scripting with Visual Basic Clone
From: sam th (sam@uchicago.edu)
Date: Wed Jun 28 2000 - 21:09:01 CDT
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On Wed, 28 Jun 2000, Big Ed wrote:
> Actually that's a pretty good idea. One of the things that is going to have
> to happen is people are going to have to learn yet another scripting
> language to create macros/etc., but if you can use a VBS clone, that will
> make the transition CONSIDERABLY easier. But please remember to restrict
> the ever-living mess out of the VB clone to avoid macro virii.
I would finally like to weigh in on the VB question with the view that I
hope never to be associated with a product involving the unmitigated
agony that is BASIC (and esp VB). In my opinion, the only langauages that
I have seen that are worse (for general programming) are COBOL and Fortran
(and I don't know much about either, so they might grow on me). I agree
with Paul that the world only needs one word processor. And I don't know
if I could sleep at night, if I helped make the world's dominant word
processor a vehicle for one of the world's worst programming languages.
As I have said, I would prefer Scheme. Scheme is easy to learn (it has
almost no syntax rules) and encourages good programming and is fun. I
don't neccessarily think this means we should us Guile (which might well
be overkill). But I imagine there will be violent opposition to any
LISP-derivative. So I would settle for a nice, easy to learn, cleanly
structured language such as Python. Or a complex, difficult to learn
language such as C++. Or even Ada. But please, not BASIC.
>
> Also, I haven't taken a look at all on how Abiword displays text, but what
> would need to take place to anti-alias the fonts? I know this is probably
> beating a dead penguin, but I'm just curious where the anti-aliasing would
> need to take place. (Abiword, Gnome, X, etc...)
Anti-aliasing is traditionally thought of as a job for X (although it
could be done anywhere, if we were to write it). Its lack is often
thought to be a major weakness in X.
sam th
sam@uchicago.edu
http://www.abisource.com/~sam/
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