From: Lennon Day-Reynolds <rcoder@...>
Date: 2004-08-28T19:12:09+09:00
Subject: Re: Typos (Was: performance comparison)

I honestly think that the issues surrounding code analysis and
verification in Ruby, Perl, Python, etc., have less to do with the
langauge per se, and more to do with the lack of any formal semantics
for it.

C, C++, Java, and most other statically-typed languages began as an
implementation language well before they were picked up by the
verification and analysis crowd. Their inital design goals are usually
less important than the stability of their respective language
definitions -- given a stable spec, the academic/research community
can devise an endless variety of clever ways to increase the level of
confidence in a language.

Unfortunately, dynamic languages are not only at a disadvantage due to
their basic design, they suffer due to a lack of formal analysis. Java
began as a simple C-like OO language, with a minimal stack-based VM on
which to operate. Now, however, it is one of the most popular
platforms on which to base your code-generation, analysis, and
transformation tools.

Were some enterprising soul to create a formal sematics for Ruby, or
even to describe it in terms of a well-defined language such as Java
or Smalltalk, I suspect that excellent tool support could follow
quickly. Unfortunately, since the current implementation of the Ruby
language always serves as the "official" language definition, there is
little that the reseach community could do to improve the tool
support.
-- 
Lennon
rcoder.net