Re: Techniques for writing an interpreter

Henry Spencer <henry@zoo.toronto.edu>
18 Mar 1998 22:51:33 -0500

          From comp.compilers

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Techniques for writing an interpreter simon@magnorth.nildram.co.uk (Simon Chapman) (1998-03-06)
Re: Techniques for writing an interpreter Nick.Roberts@dial.pipex.com (Nick Roberts) (1998-03-08)
Re: Techniques for writing an interpreter adrian@dcs.rhbnc.ac.uk (1998-03-12)
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Re: Techniques for writing an interpreter henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) (1998-03-18)
Re: Techniques for writing an interpreter dhansen@btree.com (1998-03-18)
Re: Techniques for writing an interpreter dent@cs.tu-berlin.de (Pierre Mai) (1998-03-18)
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Re: Techniques for writing an interpreter a010111t@bc.seflin.org (Orlando Llanes) (1998-03-20)
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Re: Techniques for writing an interpreter shutkoa@ugsolutions.com (alan shutko) (1998-03-24)
[2 later articles]
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From: Henry Spencer <henry@zoo.toronto.edu>
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Date: 18 Mar 1998 22:51:33 -0500
Organization: SP Systems, Toronto, Canada
References: 98-03-032 98-03-098 98-03-141 98-03-147
Keywords: interpreter, design

Fergus Henderson <fjh@cs.mu.OZ.AU> wrote:
>>...learning yet-another-extension-language.
>
>Yes. One reason is that Y-A-E-L is likely to be a much worse language
>than Python or TCL. Often extension languages have needlessly cryptic
>syntax (e.g. procmail), and/or are missing lots of crucial features
>(e.g. the elm filter language).


Indeed, the way Tcl came about was that John Ousterhout observed that
every one of the VLSI-design tools he and his grad students were building
had its own extension language, and they were all poorly designed, weak,
and buggy. "...we found ourselves spending a lot of time building bad
command languages..."
--
| Henry Spencer
| henry@zoo.toronto.edu
--


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