Re: Matlab

[Paul Prescod <address@hidden>]

Tony Kimball wrote:
> 
>...
> 
> I would take this a step further, and say that Perl has become two
> very different languages, conjoined at the hip.  One is a scripting
> language for systems tasks and one-offs which concentrates almost
> exclusively on strings, and the other is an OOPL for large systems and
> persistent code, which concentrates with similar intensity on hash
> tables and package structure qua classes.

I don't believe that there is a clear boundary there so I applaud Perl's
blurring of it. Languages which span day-to-day scripting tasks and
heavy duty OO programming are not mergers: they are merely (more)
complete than languages which restrict themselves to one end of the
programming spectrum or another. Of course domain specific languages
like Matlab and XSLT are in their own category -- text processing is
common enough (like integer math) that it belongs in a general purpose
language.

 Paul Prescod