From: John Carter Date: 2002-02-13T06:35:45+09:00 Subject: Re: Actor & Ruby On Fri, 1 Feb 2002, Aidan Mark wrote: > Does anyone else rember the Whitewater Group's programming language Actor? Oh yes, most clearly. I also remember my wail of despair when I was forced to C++. > As soon as I started programming in Ruby I began to have a deja vu feeling. > After years of Java programming Ruby seem, well, so harmonious, consistent > and sympathetic. Then it suddenly hit me, the very first OOP language I > learned also had those properties. It was also a "C"-like syntax Smalltalk > relative, where everything was an object - Actor. Except Ruby is mostly better. It gets in your way less. All I need now for bliss is the Object browsers and Inspectors. > Actor died because it was a propriatory language limited to one platform and > one development environement. When Borland C++ and VC++ boomed, Actor > dissapeared. Nah! It was bought out by a large company who essentially absorbed the programmers into other projects. Why do these large companies buy so many good things and then kill them? It is one of the very good things about ruby, being free, it can't be killed by proprietary idiocy like so many good products before it. > Shame it was a nice language, far nicer than C++. I would love > to reread its specification and make a comparison between Actor and Ruby. > Alas my copies of the manuals have dissapeared long ago. It had several curious limitations brought about by the limitations of the platform (Windows 3.1) You could only have 6 (I think) parameters to a method. (Not a problem, taught you to create parameter objects) int's where buried in the object reference. An object reference was a 16 bit index into a a table of Object handles. If the high bit was set then it was an int, not an object reference. Thus ints were 15 bit signed beasties. (That could get limiting) It was quite slow, which is why I moved to C++. It was a garbage collected, dynamic not statically type language like Ruby. It had no lexical scoping. (Not a problem, taught me that you should replace the urge to lexically scope with the urge to create a new class.) Everything was an object. Introspection was trivial, it had class / method browsers and object inspectors. You could select, edit and compile a method in a live running program. John Carter Phone : (64)(3) 358 6639 Tait Electronics Fax : (64)(3) 359 4632 PO Box 1645 Christchurch Email : john.carter@tait.co.nz New Zealand Zeitgeist shutting down for corrective maintenance, please log off.