Hi,
grey wolf wrote:
Christoph, i'm quite at a loss as to why you would need anything that any particular language doesn't provide. C++ seems to have all it needs for coding major applications, rebol has all it needs for network-oriented scripting applications, ruby has all it needs to be functionally equivalent to nearly all other scripting languages....
Well, C++ doesn't really have a decent type system, so its usefulness for large-scale applications is somewhat debatable (the fact that large programs have been created in C++ should be contrasted with the general quality of today's software, which, compared to the products of any other discipline considered to be an engineering one, is still, at the very least, embarassing).
As far as Rebol and other special-purpose programming languages are concerned, my general perception has been that these languages in general just provide convenient syntactic sugar for things that other languages would put into libraries (possibly hiding them behind some unwieldly generic syntax).
grey wolf wrote:
if you need to use one obscure and (extremely) rarely-used feature of some extremely obscure language, why do you need to create (or modify) a language that includes those features? after all, such features are so uncommon as it is.
That doesn't mean it's not useful now or in the future. Imagine suggesting networked objects to someone twenty years ago-- you would've been laughed at.
Don't get me wrong-- I don't want to change or come up with new languages at this point, I just want to examine a couple of language features from a mathematical point of view in my thesis, and try to see how they can (semantically) interact. That's why I'm looking for fresh ideas here-- networked objects, serialization, exceptions, continuations, side effects and slicing all give a lot of motivation for this kind of work, but there may be lots of useful things I'm missing.
-- Christoph