On Sun, Jul 3, 2011 at 12:24 PM, rantingrick <rantingr...@gmail.com> wrote: > Why do you constantly propagate multiplicity? Why do you feel that we > need 100 or so languages when about three would cover everything? Sure > people are free to create whatever Frankenstein language they want in > the confines of their hobby time, but we need standards and we need > them NOW. >
I specced up "the perfect language" a while ago. It gave you a clean slate with no facilities but one: Define Operator. Then you define whatever you want - let's say you start by defining = as assignment. Give it a precedence and associativity, mark it as binary, and start using it. Now, define + the same way, and -, and so on. Let's define the letter 'd' as an operator - a binary or unary operator, such that '2d6' means 'roll two six-sided dice, return the sum' (and unary 'd20' is equivalent to binary '1d20'). What's wrong with this language? It doesn't do anything, and it does everything. You could use the language for one thing and I use it for another thing. There is NO connection. We may as well be using different languages. You could have three languages in the world, if one is assembly language (for the one chip that everyone uses), one is this clean-slate language, and one is C. Have we improved anything? No. It won't be any easier to write an API for something; and it'll be a lot harder to maintain code ("wait wha? This programmer's defined + and * in opposite precedence to usual!"). But hey, there's only one language that you need to learn! Chris Angelico -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list