Graham Matthews <graham.matthews@maths.anu.edu.au> wrote:
> [ Replying to JO ]
> > I would like you ask you a question. You claim that the "everything is a
> > string" approach is the be-all-and-end-all, the way to go, etc, etc. Why
> > then has Tcl8.0 moved away from this philosophy?
Donal K. Fellows wrote:
> Semantically it hasn't. It just now has a rather neat behind-the-scenes
> way of caching the results of converting the value from a string into
> something else (like a list or number) in case it gets used like that
> again. You never see this though. It is transparent to the programmer
> (unless you are coding an extension in C and want to use the faster
> programming interface - you don't have to though) and all the user
> sees are (sometines significantly) faster programs.
Ok thats fair enough, but for me it raises another question, a question
that goes to the heart of why people think JO's article is just
advertising hype. Why did JO chose to represent everything as a string?
Why not everything as a number. Why not everything as a list? The latter
question intrigues -- JO claims that the everything as a string paradigm
makes it very easy to glue things together and that this is why Tcl is
so wonderful. Given that a string is just a list of characters you would
have thought that JO would have acknowledged somewhere in the paper that
Lisp can do what Tcl can do just as well, since in Lisp everything is a
list. The fact that JO did not mention this fact is why I think people
consider the white paper to be just marketing. The paper is not
analytical -- it praises Tcl without mentioning that other languages can
do the same kinds of things. An analytical fair paper would have
commented to this effect. A marketing paper of course would not make
such comment. ...
graham
--
Black velvet in that little boy's smile
Black velvet and a soft southern sky
A new religion that'll bring you to your knees
Black velvet, if you please
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