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Re: A few questions about Dylan.
In article <394b62d9.583151734@nntp.interaccess.com>,
olczyk@interaccess.com wrote:
> Lately I've been going around looking at various scripting languages
> trying to find one to suit my purposes.
> I've stumbled across Dylan and have a few questions about it.
>
> 1) Is Dylan a good "scripting language".
> By this I mean is it possible to throw off a few short programs
> in a short period of time.
Yes, given the right libraries and packaging of the implementation.
None of the current implementations have been specialised for this
purpose though.
Dylan as a language is as suited to scripting applications as are Perl
and Python and TCL, and more so than Java. The dynamic typing and
automatic memory management and rich data structures let you do anything
you can do in those other langugaes just as easily and tersely.
Dylan implementations range from pure interpreters (Marlais) to bytecode
compilers (Mindy) to pure compilers (d2c and Functional Developer).
All except d2c have excellent interactive debugging/exploration modes.
> 2) What is the learning curve.
> I used to use lisp, so it might be shortened.
If you know CLOS then it would be very easy, for sure.
> 3) Is there an emacs mode for Dylan.
> A language isn't ready for prime time unless it has an emacs mode.
Yes there is.
> 4) I intend to release some of the programs I write under an open
> source/GPL license, aside from releasing the source code ( which does
> no good to someone who does not have the compiler ), how hard is it to
> *legally* distribute precompiled binaries ( keep in mind, I'm giving
> this stuff away I don't keep track of who uses it or buy runtime
> licenses )
The Gwydion project is GPL'd so you can do whatever you want. The
commercial "Functional Developer" product imposes no restrictions of
distribution of binaries.
-- Bruce
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