Re: another take on hackers and painters

[Lauri Alanko <address@hidden>]

On Fri, May 23, 2003 at 02:29:26PM +0100, Bayley, Alistair wrote:
> Sorry to drag the conversation back a couple of days, but can someone
> please tell me what you would use an "eval" function for? What problem
> might you be trying to solve that would be cumbersome in a language
> without an "eval"?

My personal opinion is that any sufficiently complex interactive
application ought to be scriptable. And even if it wasn't interactive,
it should have a very expressive configuration language. In both cases,
one needs an embedded scripting language interpreter in the application.

It is of course possible to use an entirely separate interpreter for
this purpose, but then one needs to provide bindings between the
languages, and the data models of different languages are rarely
one-to-one compatible. The most straightforward solution is therefore
using the _same_ language as the one the application was written with,
since then there is only one data model. Hence, eval.


Lauri Alanko
la@iki.fi