Re: Techniques for writing an interpreter

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
--

Return to the comp.compilers page.
Search the comp.compilers archives again.