[REBOL] Re: Scope? Any advice would be appreciated.
From: dvydra2::yahoo at: 30-Jan-2001 18:15
Elan,
Thanks for your reply. A few clarifications are in
order:
--- Elan <[rebol--techscribe--com]> wrote:
> A few comments:
>
> 1. SQlWindows is not a programming language. It is a
> product - a
> database management system - that happens to use
> SQL. The DBMS product
> may not have a major market share, but REBOL is not
> a dbms product, it's
> a programming language. So we should be comparing it
> to SqlWindow's
> programming language. And SQL is quite alive and
> kicking last time I
> checked ;-).
You are probably confusing SqlWindows with SqlBase.
SqlWindows (now Centura developer) uses a language
called SAL which is quite OO, even supports multiple
inheritance.
> True, dBase includes its own programming language,
> as does Clarion (so
> you never programmed in Paradox, huh?). But in both
> cases we are again
> talking about programming languages that are
> specific to a DBMS product.
> So the competition here is about DBMS products, not
> about programming
> languages. In other words dBase and Clarion (and
> SqlWindows) lost the
> database management system competition, not the
> programming language
> competition (of course, after all Oracle is also SQL
> based).
actually Clarion bought TopSpeed which had
cross-compilers for Pascal and some other language, I
cant recall. It was something like MS .NET. I wrote
systems in Clarion that had nothing to do with a DBMS.
> As for Forte, I'm not quite sure which Forte you are
> referring to. I am
> aware of a Forte Newsgroup reader, and there's a
> Fort Java IDE. Right,
> there's also a theorem prover called Forte. You must
> mean something
> else?
sorry I meant Forte 4GL www.forte.com, my once
employer, now owned by Sun. I guess they liked the
name adn
> 2. As for the specific REBOL feature we were
> investigating: statically
> scoped local variables have been part of C for
> roughly thirty years and
> have happily made it into ANSI C++. That's pretty
> mainstream.
>
> The only thing that a C/C++ programmer has to
> realize is that a (REBOL)
> word that references a literal block (under all
> circumstances) acts
> similar to a (C) local variable that is a pointer
> (word) referencing a
> locally declared static buffer (or a globally
> declared buffer) (== REBOL
> literal block). Even though you may reassign the
> pointer to the buffer
> each time you enter the function, if that buffer was
> declared static (or
> the buffer is global), then the buffer will contain
> whatever was
> previously put into it during the previous
> evaluation of the C function.
> There's really nothing to it.
>
> My argument then is that if REBOL's success depends
> on the acceptance of
> REBOL's literal block behavior, then, given that
> mainstream languages C
> and C++ have been supporting an equivalent feature
> for quite a few
> years, REBOL is quite safe.
actually C++ had a poor reputation in many IT shops
that tried to build a system with it without having
proper "geeks" on staff.
> I don't think that REBOL is weird, and I doubt that
> the weirdness of a
> language is a guarantee for its success. But Tcl,
> Perl, and Visual Basic
> still seem to be doing quite well ...
its all in the marketing, right? :)
anyway, I really like REBOL. We started using it
instead of JavaCC to write a domain-language to XML
compiler. So far, it works well.
david
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