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Arc - An Unappreciated Approach to Language Design
- Prrometheus 19y ago>Makes you nostalgic for the pre-Sarbanes Oxley era doesn't it? SOX refers to management's legal duty to its public shareholders. It has nothing to do with customer service.
- derefr 19y agoAnd--this is just my understanding of a SOX-compliant software company; I've never actually worked in one--part of that legal duty is to document any changes made to the codebase (the product) so it can be QA-ed.
- ced 19y agoThere was a quote, which I can't find exactly so I'll paraphrase: Languages evolve not by accumulating new features, but by removing the restrictions that make those features seem necessary As far as I know, Arc does little to remove restrictions from Lisp. Examples: - (setf (* 2 x) (- y 4)) cannot be expressed. - Infinite lists - Infinite memory (limited only by the total amount of information --- far from what we have now) - Why do my objects "disappear" when the program ends? The whole serialization "feature" comes from there. - Hash-tables are 1-1 mappings. Why not n-1? Why can't I write (= (color 'nicholas 'car 2) 'blue) without having to implement it myself? - Speed of execution. Because compilers are not "sufficiently smart", we have to add declarations to the language. Did I miss anything?
- brlewis 19y agoHere's the quote: http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/~jaffer/r4rs_2.html#SEC2 http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/~jaffer/r4rs_2.html#SEC2 "Programming languages should be designed not by piling feature on top of feature, but by removing the weaknesses and restrictions that make additional features appear necessary."