From: Todd Gillespie Date: 2001-08-25T12:12:50+09:00 Subject: [ruby-talk:20347] Re: Backwards language Sean Middleditch wrote: :> runtime. In reference to the joke they called it Parrot, but the project :> is very real. : Ah. Well, again, that runtime I'm sure is still a lot larger and such : than I'm looking for. ^,^ Yes. But still quite exciting to see happen. It will be quite a formidable standard. :> I really can't follow your flow of argument through that paragraph. :> Tcl was designed for use by non-programmers scripting together larger :> elements. It sounds exactly like what you are looking for. What bothers :> you about it? Prefix notation? : Stick a programming novice in front of it with nothing but a couple of : README's and such that would likely come with a commercially produced : app embedding the language. I just couldn't parse that. Could you try again? :> I dislike Tcl for a few reasons, but it is very simple for beginners, and : Beginners to TCL or beginners to programming? ~,^ Beginners to programming. Again, that was only its design goal -- I make no argument in any direction as to its effectiveness. :> as I said, it is the easiest to embed languages out there. The :> documentation for embedding Tcl in any conceivable environment is :> extensive to say the least. The runtime is extremely simple, the :> message-passing is transparent, memory usage is small. : Hmm, I've never looked into the internals of TCL, the syntax has always : been to my severe disliking. I'll have to take a look at it, perhaps I : can learn a thing or twenty. ^,^ I hate the lack of uniformity in Tcl, where sometimes you will pass a function the contents of a variable and sometimes the name of a variable. It is also rooted in the concept of 'everything is a string', which works for 90% of integration tasks, but might be totally inappropriate for game scripting. But I can prove a point here, it might be that while competing language designers bickered about language features Tcl developers were writing documents with titles like "How to compile the Tcl interpreter into your C program". And that really made the difference.