Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] SuperClonider
From: John Lazzaro (lazzaro_AT_CS.Berkeley.EDU)
Date: Sun Apr 28 2002 - 00:25:41 EEST
> james mccartney writes
>
> Which of these languages has this been done for: Python Ruby Perl?
> I think that there is only one code tree for each of these languages.
> Are they condemned?
Yes.
Larry Rosler makes the case for Perl standardization:
http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2000/06/rosler.html
Without a standards document that precisely defines the semantics of
a language, there's no way to know what the language is. Even _you_
don't really know without the document -- every change to the existing
codebase is a decision made on the fly, as to what is normative and
what is not, without a documentation trail to back it up.
Note that this argument is true even if you're planning to copyright
the language and sue anyone who makes a compatible implementation --
the standards document acts as a contract between the language
designer and the programmers in the language, a contract that insures
that code written to the standard will act the same from revision to
revision of the compiler, as well as from compiler to compiler.
Without this semantic guarantee, the only way to make a system with
confidence written in the language is to lock down the system to
run with a particular binary version of the compiler forever. Do
you want to be riding on a train if the train braking system runs
in a system built that way?
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John Lazzaro -- Research Specialist -- CS Division -- EECS -- UC Berkeley
lazzaro [at] cs [dot] berkeley [dot] edu www.cs.berkeley.edu/~lazzaro
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