From: Dan Sugalski <dan@...>
Date: 2001-12-31T07:57:38+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:29765] Re: Python and Ruby: a comparison

At 07:40 AM 12/31/2001 +0900, Tim Roberts wrote:
>Boris Borcic <borcis@geneva-link.ch> wrote:
>
> >Conrad Schneiker wrote:
> >
> >> So my question is: at such a presently entirely hypothetical future
> >> juncture, is there any practical and desirable middle ground for a common
> >> single successor language to the current generations of Python and Ruby?
> >
> >What would be fun is to have library interoperability completed
> >with interlingual source-to-source conversion from adequately
> >constrained style... premitting more or less, to use one's language
> >superficial idioms to mean corresponding idioms in the other
> >language.
>
>Oddly enough, I believe that is almost exactly what Bill Gates believes he
>has created with .NET and the common language runtime.

To some extent he has. Sort of, for statically-typed OO languages at least.

This is old-hat for procedural languages--pretty much every DEC OS has 
always 'strongly encouraged' this, at least from the TOPS days. (And, since 
DEC wrote the compilers for the platform, it all worked right)

Of course, there's a certain nightmarish aspect to a project with COBOL, 
Fortran, PL/I, BASIC, MACRO-32 and C source modules. That's a completely 
separate issue, though. :)

					Dan

--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski                          even samurai
dan@sidhe.org                         have teddy bears and even
                                      teddy bears get drunk