From: jstern@... (Josh Stern)
Date: 2001-01-20T18:40:02+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:9594] Re: 101 Misconceptions About Dynamic Languages

Christian <christians@syd.microforte.com.au> wrote:

>If you want C++ code to work on a wide variety of compilers, with radically
>different language support, of course you will become very limited in what
>features and techniques are available. That is obvious, and says nothing
>about C++ itself. 

IMO, it actually says that the combination of i) language has only
been standardized for a short time,  ii) breaking with tradition,
the C++ standardization process agressively drove the language
evolution rather than codifying existing practice, iii) breaking
with tradition, the language designers did not provide a
working reference for all language features - witness the
fact that no major compilers yet support the 'export' linkage
directive for templates.

>That said, some valid points are made convincingly. The fact that
>proficiency in C++ implies proficiency in the environment in which it is
>being used is true. Although it could be claimed that this is both obvious
>and good, the point is taken that it can result in assumptions that fail in
>a different environment. But there are ways and means, and POSIX is a good
>start (most *nix's and Win2k are POSIX compliant, although again YMMV). It
>could be claimed that POSIX is then "a part of C++". True enough, from that
>perspective.

POSIX specifies very, very little, but substitute GNU toolchain
for POSIX and I would agree with you.


> .NET has an 'object-oriented assembly language': it's called MSIL.
>Out of interest, here's a sample. 

It was hard to look at that without some documentation describing
the meaning of the primitives.  Are there any decent on-line
references?

>Ruby does not have functions as first-class objects. You cannot pass a
>function as an argument, nor return one as a result.

At http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/compar.html, Matz says
"Ruby's functions (methods) are not first class objects"
but I don't understand this point, actually.  Ruby does
have the 'Proc' class which is a function object.
Just like in C++, an instance method requires object to use
it.  However, one can easily pass tuples of
<object,methodName>, <moduleName,methodName>,
<object,methodSymbol>, etc.
which amounts to the same thing in Ruby because the thing
that is invoked by a function call in the language
is 'the thing bound to that name', not a hunk of
code at a machine address.

-= Josh