Unofficial wish list status.(Jul 2008)

[superdan]

Yigal Chripun Wrote:

> Walter,
> Thanks for replying, please see my notes in the body of the text
> 
> Walter Bright wrote:
> > Yigal Chripun wrote:
> >> The word example is wrong in that, in your example, bill doesn't need
> >> feature #1678, and sue doesn't need #543. The answer to that is a model
> >> similar to eclipse: both sue and bill can use eclipse but since bill
> >> works with c/c++ he can get a pre-packaged version with CDT which is
> >> much smaller than the entire eclipse project, and sue can get her
> >> eclipse pre-packaged with JDT since she works with Java. This is why
> >> Eclipse is so popular and supported by many large companies like oracle,
> >> IBM, etc.. The same goes to the popular browser Firefox and its
> >> extensions. No need to bundle everything like Microsoft word does, it's
> >> much better to have a system to allow users to integrate features they
> >> require beyond the lean & mean core.
> > 
> > What you're saying is provide a lean & mean core with a pluggable
> > architecture that can be extended by 3rd parties. I think you're quite
> > right that that is a better system than all-in-one.
> > 
> > D has a lot of support for "pluggable architecture", such as template
> > metaprogramming and string mixins. Lisp is famous for being a very
> > pluggable language.
> > 
> > Unfortunately, I don't see any way to be able to "plug in" the needed
> > support for functional coding, there just isn't enough basic capability
> > in the language. We're trying to fix that.
> 
> Walter, please take a look at the design used by Nemerle.
> The language designers of Nemerle achieved a _very_ pluggable
> architecture via Macros (probably identical to your idea of AST macros).
> their system allows to implement whole subsets of the language
> *including the syntax* as plugins which in D are now part of the
> language. They have DBC, concurrency, etc implemented like that. they
> have a plan to make an AOP plugin as well.
> look at:
> http://nemerle.org/Macros
> http://nemerle.org/Syntax_extensions
> http://nemerle.org/doc/Nemerle.Compiler.html
> etc..

nemerle is a stillborn, you can quote me on that. since 1970 languages tried to make configurable syntax palatable. never works. ever heard of imp72? that's telling. probably the nemerle folks also didn't know. and they will pay for it.

why is it the case that configurable syntax never works? no idea. if i had to venture an opinion i'd say configurable syntax does not come natural to humans. natural language has fixed syntax.