I've been thinking about this issue more generally. Programming language enhancement does not seem to be especially a beginner's topic. But a beginner may not have biases that inhibit greater insight; and such insight could also be well served by a sufficient conceptual basis and historical knowledge - to ensure that something new and significant is really introduced. After all, programming experts have been mulling over "new" developments for over 40 years!
Here are few considerations that your discussion stimulated in me. They lead to a question for possible enhancement of pearl that I pose at the end: 1. You can pipe into and out of control constructs in the sh-ksh-bash family, including for and while loops. This can be convenient and elegant, but not absolutely necessary logically. It shows a sense in which every control construct "returns" a value including loops. In this case that facility is based on a common underlying "medium" of communication, namely the STDIN and STDOUT streams of chars. This "medium" can also be used to link scripts externally, a rudimentary but powerful form of interprocess communication! The basic idea has appeared in several more elaborate forms of greater generality or for certain application domains including: A. The "communicating sequential processes" model and language (CSP) of Tony Hoare. CSP is a general model for concurrency and a widely and well regarded useful way to achieve parallelism for non-trivial, real world and often real time problems. See http://www.usingcsp.com/. CSP has been instantiated in Java and has had active participation in specialized conferences for 7 years. B. The use of threads in programming, lightweight and otherwise, in an effort to make complex systems development more efficient and affordable /* The common "thread" in between (A), (B) and the discussion is that CSP and thread programming provide a general mechanism for processes to pass (and return) information to each other */ C. Image and signal processing and more generally data flow systems and architectures that have many useful applications and instantiations and tend to represent a higher level application of CSP concepts. For example, AVS/5, see (http://www.avs.com/software/soft_t/avs5.html) 2. Related new specific paradigms include cellular automata (see Stephen Wolfram's work - http://www.wolframscience.com/) neural nets (http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/html/faqs/ai/neural/faq.html) and the mathematical theory of dynamical systems (see http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~philos/MindDict/dynamicsystems.html for a definition of the latter). 3. At a more comprehensive biopsychosocial level, all of this fits with post-postmodernism and evolution to and past the "yellow meme" in Spiral Dynamics, see http://www.spiraldynamics.com/reviews/SD/SDreview_Dinan.htm and the writings of Ken Wilbur, for example http://wilber.shambhala.com/html/books/kosmos/excerptD/part1.cfm/ 4. Lisp as a special case of a programming language is unusually congruent because all of its programs and the input and output they accept have the same form, namely they are lists. That enables a maximum degree of "recursivability" that can lead to impressive solutions some areas, for example mathematical theorem discovery and proof in Lenat's AM program although it didn't conquer the world :), see http://www.comp.glam.ac.uk/pages/staff/efurse/Abstracts/Why-did-AM-halt. html On another hand: 5. A time honored approach to problem understanding and solution has been to decompose the problem space into a minimal spanning set of orthogonal "vectors" (constructs, concepts). In programming its been found that only sequence, conditionality and iteration (looping) constructs are needed for Turing completeness (see almost any college level text on algorithms and data structures). Often the language is given certain implementation efficiencies through the use of an underlying data structure, for example lists in LISP and stacks in Forth, but in principle all Turing complete languages are logically complete meaning any program in one can be translated into a program in another. Wolfram has demonstrated Turing equivalence even for a simple cellular automata (ibid). However, there are a lot of theoretical issues around Turing equivalence, for example it has been proven that it is not generally "decidable" ( see http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/~galley/cs3261/outline.html). And 6. While lumping together fundamental capabilities may have some human or machine implementation efficiencies, particularly for certain types of problems (or certain types of people), sometimes it has been precisely the unlumping or decoupling of such capabilities that has lead to breakthroughs, for example the separation of the existence and visibility of variables that Nicklaus Wirth made in Modula-3 was a critical precedent that logically led to object oriented programming as we know it today! 7. Perhaps the single key characteristic that makes perl most resemble a natural language is that the typing of variables is determined by context. That can be viewed as a method for relumping fundamental capabilities in ways that are hopefully adequate and maybe even interesting. How would it be possible to apply this to loops such that only in certain contexts they would return a value and what would those contexts be? Perhaps, for example, it would be useful to implement a tagging system on all control constructs such that if they were tagged in a certain way all of their output (if any) was returned using a commonly accessible read-write communication channel analogous to STDIN and STDOUT for sh-ksh-bash scripts. An advantage of this would be to make it easier to write perl programs that do more complex processing in a way that is more natural, flowing and intuitive for people. What do you think? -tristram -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
