On Wed, Dec 01, 2004 at 01:34:57AM -0800, Brent 'Dax' Royal-Gordon wrote: > Cameron Zemek <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > The FAQ mentions that the JVM and CLR (.Net VM) are not suited to > > dynamic languages. I was wondering why this is the case. > > Dynamic languages have a few features in common: > - Very weak typing with lots of automatic conversion. > - Oddball control flow constructs (closures, co-routines, > continuations, and a few things that don't start with C). > - An "eval" or similar function. > > [snipped] > > Brent 'Dax' Royal-Gordon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
I don't think that "oddball control flow constructs" like closures are proper to dynamic languages. For example, OCAML (another camel related language :) relies on type inference at compile time so is by nature a statically typed language. It supports closure and exceptions. I don't know about continuations, coroutines. Also, OCAML demonstrates that the existence of a run-eval-loop is othogonal to the dynamicity of a language. Not that you said anything to the contrary. Anyway the expression "dynamic typed language" would be clearer than "dynamic langague". BTW, the english translation of the French O'Reilly bool on OCAML is freely available: http://caml.inria.fr/oreilly-book/ -- stef
