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Re: A question
rwk@americom.com wrote:
>
> It is a real shame too, as next to the language "Self" (which fizzled
> out and I have no idea why as it was *so* cool), Dylan is the only other
> language I am aware of which even approaches a 21st century language.
Hmm. Before fading away Self did inspire NewtonScript. Oops, never mind
;-)
There are others: Sather for instance. And then all the "real
functional" languages. But they don't seem to be getting much success
either. (Except maybe Erlang and Haskell, because of their sponsorship.)
Too many people making decisions with too little real knowledge means
that success belongs to the language with the biggest marketing budget.
Sad.
> Multi-methods are also one of it's best features. Eg, if you have an
> object and you want it to display itself in an arbitrary windowing
> system, multi-methods will dispatch you to the right function. So,
>
> display(listBox, motifWindow)
>
> can dispatch on both listBox and motifWindow to call the function which
> is specific to both classes.
Thanks for the example.
> I understand, Harliquin's Dylan provides incremantal compilation (in a
> running application) though I have not used it. I would like to know
> how well it works. Is Smalltalk interpreted?
I'm really a neophyte with this. But so far I've been able to
incrementally compile changes into a running program and the results
were exactly as expected. I've also been able to interact quite freely
with the running program in the interactor (similar to the Lisp
listener). It wasn't until the recent article on CORBA interaction that
I realized that you can "interact" with a program without running
it--IOW all the methods and functions are available to be called, but
"main" (in C terms) didn't run--very much like working in an
interpreter...
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