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Re: Continuations



Dan Sugalski <dan@sidhe.org> writes:

> At 4:12 PM -0400 8/8/03, Alan Bawden wrote:

[...]

> >Don't Perl or Java programmers ever write interpreters?
> 
> Rarely. These days almost *nobody* writes interpreters. But, then
> almost nobody ever has. In the past there were just fewer people
> overall, so almost nobody was a larger percentage of the population. I
> suspect you're also hanging around a rather unusual subset of
> programmers, which is a common thing for the people on this list.

I disagree.  I think people write interpreters all the time; they just
don't realize they're writing them, so they crank out lame, ad hoc
interpreters that don't do a whole lot.

One project I worked on actually had 4-5 *different* interpreters in
it, just because as many different programmers decided to invent their
own, incompatible, configuration file formats.  And this is a project
that already had its own full-blown, turing-complete scripting
language that, appearently, the other programmers either didn't know
or like well enough to use for their own purposes (not that I blame
them; it was a really crappy language).

My experience may be atypical (I work on video games), but I can't
think of too many useful programs that don't, at least, have some
configuration or document files that they interpret.

Best wishes,

Chris Baker

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