Re: What would your ideal language be like...

[Sundar Narasimhan <address@hidden>]

   (This could get us into the great discussion that happened at Symbolics 
   about having a
   command processor: should it be a different langauge or the same 
   language?  We managed
   to get the best of both worlds to a great degree, but the only point I 
   want to make here was
   that a lot of us really did think that there was a reason to have a 
   command processor
   at all rather than just have everybody do everything from the 
   read-eval-print loop.)

Yes I agree. BTW, I loved the cp: stuff so much that I think I may
have annoyed a bunch of people by writing one in C (it came close :)
in massive thesis-avoidance mode. Required me to hack some assembler
because C doesn't give you control over how functions are called from
within the language itself.

Interestingly, Saber-C (which was an interpreted environment for
C/C++) used nearly the same hack. ctrl-space completions in eclipse
comes close, but not quite.

But the key point about command processor was that you didn't have to
know how it worked to write the underlying functions it would
call. The layer separation worked there in a way that the JCL example
I pointed out doesn't. I have no objection to layers per-se.