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None of these are established as a single compatible language but rather as a family of languages. Wolfram obviously isn't aiming for that. Go to Wolfram's pa

by muyuu 13y ago

None of these are established as a single compatible language but rather as a family of languages. Wolfram obviously isn't aiming for that. Go to Wolfram's page. That is no spec, it's a rough description of a particular implementation of a (closed source) system.

abjorn 13y ago
It's not as if they started as a "family" of languages, each one of those was just one discrete language at one point.
- muyuu 13y ago
  I'm a big fan of Prolog and Scheme, but seriously the lack of an established solid spec has seriously hurted them. There's no way Wolfram can succeed with its much more complex feature set without a spec and a reference implementation that's not closed source. Flash pulled that because they caught that opportunity window in the browsed, but neither CDF as a format nor Wolfram (Mathematica language) stand a chance as a generic language. Even Matlab stays niche.
  - colanderman 13y ago
    You think ISO Prolog and R6RS aren't "established" and "solid"?
    - muyuu 13y ago
      Definitely. I use both and nobody uses ISO Prolog and much less pure R6RS scheme. Here's hoping R7RS will be better although for starters it will be divided in two (small and big). I've been following the process quite closely. R6RS completely failed to establish itself, to this day R5RS is more popular. You'd be hard pressed to find a more divided language than Scheme. As for ISO Prolog, it's not even the most popular standard. It might be in America, in Europe it's definitely Edinburgh Prolog and there's where it's used the most. You guys are giving me great examples of how interpreted languages without a clear spec + reference implementation completely fail to establish a single standard. It can be argued that in the case of Scheme this is a feature, but for something like Wolfram with an existing closed runtime you definitely don't want this.
colanderman 13y ago
Uh, all ISO Prolog programs run on all ISO Prolog implementations, regardless of what extensions a particular implementation has. Same for RxRS Scheme. And VHDL and C99 definitely aren't "families" of languages. GCC, Clang, ICC, and maybe even MSVC all interpret the same code semantically equivalently. Unless you can either show C99 to be unsuccessful, find a reference implementation of C99, or define "interpreted" in a meaningful way, I think your assertion doesn't hold.

by muyuu 13y ago

abjorn 13y ago

It's not as if they started as a "family" of languages, each one of those was just one discrete language at one point.

muyuu 13y ago
I'm a big fan of Prolog and Scheme, but seriously the lack of an established solid spec has seriously hurted them. There's no way Wolfram can succeed with its much more complex feature set without a spec and a reference implementation that's not closed source. Flash pulled that because they caught that opportunity window in the browsed, but neither CDF as a format nor Wolfram (Mathematica language) stand a chance as a generic language. Even Matlab stays niche.
- colanderman 13y ago
  You think ISO Prolog and R6RS aren't "established" and "solid"?
  - muyuu 13y ago
    Definitely. I use both and nobody uses ISO Prolog and much less pure R6RS scheme. Here's hoping R7RS will be better although for starters it will be divided in two (small and big). I've been following the process quite closely. R6RS completely failed to establish itself, to this day R5RS is more popular. You'd be hard pressed to find a more divided language than Scheme. As for ISO Prolog, it's not even the most popular standard. It might be in America, in Europe it's definitely Edinburgh Prolog and there's where it's used the most. You guys are giving me great examples of how interpreted languages without a clear spec + reference implementation completely fail to establish a single standard. It can be argued that in the case of Scheme this is a feature, but for something like Wolfram with an existing closed runtime you definitely don't want this.

colanderman 13y ago

Uh, all ISO Prolog programs run on all ISO Prolog implementations, regardless of what extensions a particular implementation has. Same for RxRS Scheme. And VHDL and C99 definitely aren't "families" of languages. GCC, Clang, ICC, and maybe even MSVC all interpret the same code semantically equivalently. Unless you can either show C99 to be unsuccessful, find a reference implementation of C99, or define "interpreted" in a meaningful way, I think your assertion doesn't hold.