Re: newbie questions and comments

["Chris Double" <address@hidden>]

>comments on any of this would be welcome.  also, specifically, dylan appears
>to be proprietary.  is this correct, and if so, is that a big problem for
>the language? 

'Dylan' the language is not proprietary. There are free open source implementations of the language and a commercial implementation including an IDE and various libraries. The commercial implementation also includes much open source. More information can be found at:

http://www.double.co.nz/dylan 

To summarise, the commercial implementation is available at: http://www.functionalobjects.com 
Gwydion Dylan, an Open Source compiler is available at: http://www.gwydiondylan.org 
Marlais, an Open Source interpreter, is available at: http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/marlais 

The thing I like about Dylan (and Common Lisp) is multimethods and the generic function approach to OO. I miss this in most other languages I use. Especially with Dylan which includes singleton and type union types. CLOS also has around, before and after methods which I like to use and miss in Dylan. I've been trying David Simmon's SmallScript which includes multimethods as well, along with before, after and around methods (and more). It's great to see other languages introducing these features.

Chris.