Re: Current work in compiler/language design.

In article 91-11-066, Bob Hathaway <objsys@netcom.com>
writes many things which strike me as a bit uninformed. I shall leave
aside the ones that I don't know so much about, but:


> How about LISP based systems (boy do I expect it here): Are they general
> purpose? Not really, they are interpreted and run several hundred times
> slower than compiled code (although this could change).


Specifically, this has changed a long time ago. Even interpreted code does
not run that much more slowly than compiled code, and compiled LISP code
does not necessarily run at all slowly. If you look at some of the papers
and dissertations that have come out of the Yale T (T is a Scheme-like LISP
dialect) project, for example, you will find benchmarks showing that their T
compiler is competitive with and often faster than C and Pascal compilers.


> They usually
> don't have static typing, so you have no choice, dynamic typing or naught.


Just because you can't completely type-check a language at compile time
doesn't mean that you can't do any type-checking.


> They have an unnatural syntax, big violation here.


Some of us rather prefer LISP syntax, actually.


> As far as other nice features of Lisp based (OO) languages, functional,
> logic, etc., just identify them, if they're useful we can add them to
> almost any programming language.


Perhaps, though I wouldn't want to think what a logic-based version of C
would look like. But I do not understand how this proves anything about the
superiority of object-oriented methods - certainly they can also be added to
many programming languages.


> In fact if we add up all of the new facilities we would like to add
> to existing programming languages, this is also a common definition
> of object-oriented programming.


Object-oriented facilities may be the only sort of new facilities that you
can think of; other people can think of more.


> Solution to 97% of all compiler related bugs and problems(by my best guess):
> Encapsulation as provided by object-oriented programs.


Were not similar claims made for structured programming? It helped,
certainly, but nowhere near that much.


david carlton
carlton@husc.harvard.edu
--

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