Re: Continuations

[Dan Sugalski <address@hidden>]

At 4:04 PM -0700 8/9/03, Chris Baker wrote:
>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.

A config file parser really isn't an interpreter by itself, though I 
have certainly seen enough of them get some form of control 
structures and logic added. Still, it's generally a rare occurrence, 
at least relative to the number of people actually writing code. 
(This is one of the places that the "scripting" languages often get a 
mild win -- since they can all do runtime evaluation of source, most 
people don't bother writing their own language if they need fancy 
configuration stuff and just use source in the language they're 
writing the app in)
-- 
                                         Dan

--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski                          even samurai
dan@sidhe.org                         have teddy bears and even
                                       teddy bears get drunk