Subject: Re: Scripting with Visual Basic Clone
From: sam th (sam@uchicago.edu)
Date: Thu Jun 29 2000 - 07:24:30 CDT
On Thu, 29 Jun 2000, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> If you don't use OO, hashes, pointers multi-dimensional arrays etc.
> and you aren't easily confused by changing look of tokens ( begin/end to {/} etc.)
> nor forcing indents they are almost equal.
>
> Function calls look the same.
> Basic math looks the same.
> There is the same logic under flow-control in them all.
> All have statement/expresion, lvalue/rvalue etc.
>
> There are pascal2c and c++2c translating programs.
> Perl's basics are very C-like.
> Python is most different of them all, but also shares a lot with them.
>
> Compare they all to SCHEME (LISP).
> See size of difference now ?
Yes, they are clearly all very different from a functional language. And
even more different from LISP dialects. But on each of your points, the
similariteis you mention are not that significant.
Flow-control - you could easily (well, maybe not easily) use recursion for
all your c loops.
Basic math - this is just a lisp thing. Haskell, for example, uses infix
for math.
statement/expression, rval, lval - all of these are present in scheme also
for example, the following is illegal
(define (+ 2 3) (+ 4 5))
>
> > > Please find (or invent - it's FREE-software world, everyone is free to create
> > > a new language) a language with minimum syntax and almost-no silly
> > > characters. Then we will start Replacement-For-VBasic Crusade. :-)
> > > ( this paragraph is real, there is real lack of such language,
> > > and inventing languages is easier now that any time before )
> >
> > Scheme has almost no syntax (see next message).
> > Scheme has only one "silly character": the parenthesis.
> > And that character makes programming *easier* in many cases.
>
> With `almost-no silly characters' I meant almost-no per line.
> And there is one sillychar more : unbalanced-single-quote.
>
'x is just an abbreviation for (quote x).
And I still don't think that (,) are silly.
sam th
sam@uchicago.edu
http://www.abisource.com/~sam
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