Re: Why you should not use Tcl

Geoff Lane (zzassgl@cs6400.mcc.ac.uk)
30 Sep 1994 15:18:24 +0100

Barry Merriman (barry@arnold.math.ucla.edu) wrote:
: As for the dual language solution, III:
: This does not seem like a good solution to me! Two language with
: the same capabilities but vastly different syntaxes??? It
: seems like the natural evolution of such a system will be that
: either one language or the other will greatly dominate in
: use---which defeats the purpose of having two, since one becomes
: the defacto standard---or most projects will be written in
: bits and pieces of both, which just means everyone has to know
: all of them, and constantly switch back and forth between
: different languages that do nearly the same thing
: (much like the situation with the various unix shell languages
: these days: sh, csh, tcsh, ksh, bash, rc...).

As I remember the current lisp syntax was created in order to describe the
behaviour of the language in the original paper describing lisp - it was
never intended to be used for real-world programming. Unfortunately the
followup paper describing the `proper' syntax never appeared.

--
Geoff. Lane. | Internet: zzassgl@cs6400.mcc.ac.uk | Janet: zzassgl@uk.ac.mcc
CS6400 Sys Admin, Manchester Computing Centre, Oxford Rd,  Manchester, M13 9PL

"This is mine; that's mine [etc.]; I'm claiming all this as mine... except that bit. I don't want that bit. But all the rest of this is mine! Hey, this has been a good day! I've eaten five times, I've slept six times, and I'd made a lot of things mine! Tomorrow I'm going to see if I can't have sex with something!" -- Cat