In article <5ibl1p$5et$2@csnews.cs.colorado.edu>,
Tom Christiansen <tchrist@mox.perl.com> wrote:
> fellowsd@cs.man.ac.uk (Donal K. Fellows) writes:
>: toplevel .t
>: button .t.b -text Hi! -font {Times 16} -command {puts "Pressed at (%x,%y)"}
>: pack .t.b -fill both -expand 1
>:How much extra Lisp would be needed to achieve this?
>Strange how often people seem to confuse Tk with Tcl. You aren't
>talking about Tcl here.
Yes and no. Some of the discussion has wandered off the main thrust of JO's
paper, but Donal's point here is LOC (or perhaps more generally syntactic
simplicity). The use of Tk here proves a point because Tk has been grafted
onto so many other languages. The example above is written most "plainly"
(concisely / fewest chars with greatest clarity / ...) when written in Tcl.
That is not to say "Tcl is the best, everyone else bugger off". From
certain viewpoints, it is an advantage. As for other's arguments about JO's
horrible injustices for neglecting to mention <your lang here>, get a clue.
This was a white paper of ~10 pages, not some PhD thesis on languages. The
sum total of the comments alone so far are an order of magnitude longer.
Such a paper isn't just meant for language theorists or die-hard engineers,
but also managerial or business types who are being convinced to use a
scripting language.
Probably JO's worst infraction is the point that tchrist brought up about
portraying "systems" and "scripting" language features as absolutes instead
of breaking down the definitions further.
However, within the realm of JO's original paper, try the above example in
Java. Then try and make it look not so ugly.
--
Jeffrey Hobbs jhobbs@cs.uoregon.edu,@or.cadix.com
Software Engineer, Oregon R&D office: 541.683.7891
CADIX International, Inc. fax: 541.683.8325
URL: http://www.cs.uoregon.edu/~jhobbs/
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