Re: Rather, DSSLs increase modularity, productivity

[Mike Newhall <address@hidden>]

       LISP-like languages aren't attractive solely for implementation reasons, I think; LISP wins for ease of programming.  Fewer lines of code is a great reason to pick one language over another for a DSL.  I would imagine it would be easier to code the high-level logic for an application in Scheme or CL rather than Forth or Perl.  In a hypothetical large enough project that the implementation cost of a DSL were no object, I think a case could be made that a higher-order functional language with garbage collection and code = data etc. would still be the best choice.  I think these are just great features in any language, or at least any where expressiveness and programmer time are valued above memory footprint and execution speed.  The nature of a DSL in particular is to have a relatively small amount of 'executive' code, with the heavy lifting done elsewhere (or within language primitives), so I would think even a naive, slow, memory hungry interpreter could fit in to many application designs on today's hardware.  Provided we draw the boundaries in the right place.  :-D


Dan Sugalski wrote:

On Sun, 16 Nov 2003, Mike Newhall wrote:

  

This is consistent with the semi-humorous comment that all
large systems eventually implement an ad hoc version of LISP -- perhaps
what they are really doing is implementing a DSL, and a LISP-like
language is the ideal type of language to implement DSLs.
    

I've been involved in a number of projects that either already implemented
a LISP-like language as a DSL or were in the process of doing so. The
two biggest (and, in fact, sole) reasons for a Lisp-like language were
ease of implementation and small memory footprint.