Re: Looking for new language features

Randall Hyde wrote <something that John replied to>:


>
> [...More to the point,
> application libraries are swell, but we've been building them for 50
> years without adding syntax to the base language. Maybe I'm just
> insufficiently imaginative, but it's hard to see a lot of places where
> libraries that add syntax would be worth the confusion they caused.
>
> ...
> -John]


Point well taken. And just adding syntax, as these old extension
languages seemed to do, doesn't appeal to me either. On the other
hand, I see an advantage to extensible languages with regard to
efficiency of generated code. If the extension can look at various
parts of the code to figure out what to do then it might be able to
generate better code than what can be done with a library. Such
extensibility could replace specialty languages like Bison, code
generator generators, and tcl/tk with constructs that are easier to
build (compared to writing an entire language) and easier to embed in
an application.


Matt

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