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

[Daniel Weinreb <address@hidden>]

Sundar Narasimhan wrote:

>(I've
>complained about this since the first day I had to program, and
>someone mentioned that the reason why my first fortran program didn't
>work was because I'd neglected to include some stupid JCL card that
>defined devices 4, 5 etc. :)
>
Well, aside from making fun of the use of the special-small-integers, 
you have two alternatives.
First, you could hard-code into your program what the I/.O streams 
should be opened to, e.g.

(with-open-file (my-input :input "/usr/dlw/foo")
   (with-open-file (my-output :output "/usr/dlw/bar")
         <code using my-input and my-output>))

That's great, no JCL needed, it just works.  But it always uses exactly
those file names, and you can't do anything about it without editing the
source code, and maybe recompiling which might be more automatic
or less automatic.

Or you can have some level of indirection.  The program could get its
filenames from reading command line arguments: then you could have
neglected to include some stupid command line arguments.  Or it could
use Unix-style environment variables, in which case you could have
neglected to set some stupid environment variables.  Or you could use
more elaborate versions of the same general idea as are done in the
Java 2 Enterprise Edition with its concept of deployment descriptors.
It's all very analogous.

I don't think this has much to do with whther I/O is in "libraries" or not.