Two standard libraries?

[Chris Nicholson-Sauls]

Bill Baxter wrote:
> Robert Fraser wrote:
>> I stand corrected.
> 
> Ok people come on.  Doesn't he have something of a point?  Doesn't byte 
> compilation at least remove the names of local variables that clearly 
> are not and therefor cannot ever be referred to by name?
> 
> --bb

It depends upon the language.  To return to Ruby as an example, this is 
a language that only supports full reflection, but even full mutation at 
run-time, to the extent that much of a Ruby application could easily be 
generated on the fly.  Therefore, in this case at least, absolute all 
such state information and meta-information MUST be retained.  In the 
case of PHP, for example, it might be able to toss quite a lot of them, 
yes, based on the presence or absence of those few constructs that make 
use of them.  Then again that could actually make it compile slower, and 
PHP apps aren't usually designed to be long-lived.  Increased PHP 
compile times means losing much of its usefulness.

I'd be interested in seeing what Java does.

-- Chris Nicholson-Sauls