"Darren New" <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote in message 
news:47d99d76$1@news.povray.org...
> St. wrote:
>>       Tens of THOUSANDS?? I'm not that shocked at what a programmer can 
>> do, but fair play for handling that.
>
> Yeah. A couple weeks of raw audio, in 20-second chunks. Sadly, we throw 
> most of it away. :-)

     Really? Well, that's still cool. What you've pointed out is still 
beyond my grasp, but I still admire what you guys and girls can do. Me, I'm 
just a computer user.  :o/   (Null points there then!)   ;)


          ~Steve~



>
> -- 
>   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
>     "That's pretty. Where's that?"
>          "It's the Age of Channelwood."
>     "We should go there on vacation some time."

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Darren New wrote:
> Chambers wrote:
>> That's the idea behind metaprogramming, after all.  You write 
>> something that gets turned into code for whatever your actual 
>> situation is :)
> 
> And if the metaprogramming was built into the compiler, I'd agree that C 
> is nicely portable.  :-)
> 
> C isn't portable. C + autoconf + the dozen tools that autoconf depends 
> on + knowing all the arcane invocations you need to include to use 
> autoconf is what's portable.
> 
> I mean, heck, 6502 assembler is portable, if you write a program to 
> interpret it on a bunch of other machines, yes?
> 

Absolutely, and I mean that quite literally.

It just goes to show that sometimes, our ideas of what words should 
mean, and the reality of the situation, are very different things.

After all, what is the *point* of portability?  Being able to use the 
same program on different machines with minimal work.  Sometimes the 
easiest way to do that will surprise you.

-- 
...Ben Chambers
www.pacificwebguy.com

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Chambers wrote:
> Absolutely, and I mean that quite literally.

I think portability isn't a binary quality.  You seem to be saying that 
any turing-complete language is equally portable because you could write 
an interpreter for it in some other language.  So why do people complain 
about C# being microsoft-only? :-)

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     "That's pretty. Where's that?"
          "It's the Age of Channelwood."
     "We should go there on vacation some time."

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Darren New wrote:
> Chambers wrote:
>> Absolutely, and I mean that quite literally.
> 
> I think portability isn't a binary quality.  You seem to be saying that 
> any turing-complete language is equally portable because you could write 
> an interpreter for it in some other language.  So why do people complain 
> about C# being microsoft-only? :-)
> 

Because they're lazy-a** b****es who would rather complain about ideals 
than get real work done?

After all, what if someone made a CPU that could execute Java bytecode 
directly?  (In fact, I think someone *has* done this)  At this point, 
the Java bytecode is now machine language.  Does that make it any less 
portable?

He**, is the Java bytecode any less portable for requiring an 
interpreter to begin with?

-- 
...Ben Chambers
www.pacificwebguy.com

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Chambers <ben### [at] pacificwebguycom> wrote:
> Darren New wrote:
> > I think portability isn't a binary quality.  You seem to be saying that
> > any turing-complete language is equally portable because you could write
> > an interpreter for it in some other language.  So why do people complain
> > about C# being microsoft-only? :-)
>
> Because they're lazy-a** b****es who would rather complain about ideals
> than get real work done?

No, I'd say it's because C# the language is about as useful as Java the
language:  not at all!  Both don't work outside their humongous associated
libraries/frameworks.

So, commiting to implemente said "languages" -- for them to be useful to
developers -- is commiting to implement not just a parser anb compiler but also
all the cruft people expect.  And guess what?!  C# is an ECMA standard, but not
..NET!  Thus, implementing a C# compiler by itself is not that useful.  Unless
you wish to follow a "standard" dictated by a single company with its
well-known forced upgrade cycle and be always left way behind.

Or simply ship a free compiler and help spread C# apps that require a licensed
framework to run.

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Chambers wrote:
> After all, what if someone made a CPU that could execute Java bytecode 
> directly?  (In fact, I think someone *has* done this) 

Actually, the Dolphin computer had programmable microcode and was used 
to run Smalltalk early on, interpreting Smalltalk bytecodes directly. So 
yah, like that.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     "That's pretty. Where's that?"
          "It's the Age of Channelwood."
     "We should go there on vacation some time."

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> After all, what if someone made a CPU that could execute Java bytecode 
> directly?  (In fact, I think someone *has* done this)

Yes, I think there are native CPUs for java bytecode; mainly for 
embedded devices where it's better to have a slow-ish CPU running Java 
directly than a fast CPU running a software interpreter (and sucking 
more power off the battery).

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nemesis wrote:
> No, I'd say it's because C# the language is about as useful as Java the
> language:  not at all!  Both don't work outside their humongous associated
> libraries/frameworks.

Personally, I'm looking into Erlang right now, thinking about how it 
might work for the code I have at work. Looks pretty cool, but it's one 
of those things that it seems most of the stuff makes sense at the 
fundamental assignment/arithmetic/functioncall level, and then there are 
libraries for things like "Build a release of several applications that 
let you upgrade a running system along with the distributed database 
schema without shutting it down." So like the "kernel" and "stdlib" 
documents are together 800 pages (something like 60 pages of one-line 
descriptions for routines in Kernel), and all the stuff in between is 
just huge.

Contrast with C#, where each library is pretty well distinct, for the 
most part. You can read about the regexp library without even knowing 
about the existence of the dynamic-code-loading library.

I think for anything particularly useful, you're going to have big 
libraries anyway. It's hard to build an "enterprise" class application 
without a whole bunch of stuff, so why not design a library for 
enterprise-class applications and actually use it in your system? C#, I 
think, started out with the idea, rather than building it up without 
extensive language support like Java did.

Got the book on order, tho, so that should help.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     "That's pretty. Where's that?"
          "It's the Age of Channelwood."
     "We should go there on vacation some time."

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Personally, I'm looking into Erlang right now... the "kernel" and "stdlib"
> documents are together 800 pages (something like 60 pages of one-line
> descriptions for routines in Kernel), and all the stuff in between is
> just huge.
>
> Contrast with C#, where each library is pretty well distinct, for the
> most part. You can read about the regexp library without even knowing
> about the existence of the dynamic-code-loading library.

Why is it any different with the Erlang library?  I've just taken a look at
stdlib in http://erlang.org/doc/pdf/ and, though a big document, the various
modules it describes as part of the "standard library" are clearly all distinct
and separate from each other, with an occasional reference to related
functionality in other modules.

Perhaps what bothered you is that the unmaintained docs are kept in PDF files
without links rather than a cross-referenced tree-based Windows Help file?

> I think for anything particularly useful, you're going to have big
> libraries anyway.

I didn't say otherwise.  I said .NET is closed and non-standardized and C#
without it is like bread and no butter -- well, much worse actually...

> It's hard to build an "enterprise" class application
> without a whole bunch of stuff, so why not design a library for
> enterprise-class applications and actually use it in your system?

Actually, the thing that p*** me off about Java libs or .NET or even Python etc
is that they're all just a bunch of redundant -- but perhaps a bit more
convenient -- wrappers to existing OS functionality.  In the case of Java or
Python at least, this leads to cross-platform ease.  In the case of .NET, it's
just Windows2 on top of Windows1, really, for no reason other than captivating
an evergoing mass of programming enterprise drones that prefer to type
FileAccess.ChangeDirectory(dir) rather than cd(dir) or something...

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nemesis wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>> Personally, I'm looking into Erlang right now... the "kernel" and "stdlib"
>> documents are together 800 pages (something like 60 pages of one-line
>> descriptions for routines in Kernel), and all the stuff in between is
>> just huge.
>>
>> Contrast with C#, where each library is pretty well distinct, for the
>> most part. You can read about the regexp library without even knowing
>> about the existence of the dynamic-code-loading library.
> 
> Why is it any different with the Erlang library? 

Look at anything other than the stdlib module.  I'm still wading thru 
kernel, but stuff like understanding the supervisor model, or the 
release application, or the mnesia stuff, requires a whole bunch of 
background.  (Not that it's hard to find the background. It's just 
there's a whole lot of it.)

C# probably has a lot of similar stuff, like when you're doing code 
generation and such. Understanding "assemblies" for example takes a lot 
of background, but doing something with assemblies that needs that 
understanding that stuff is unusual rather than step one.

In other words, I can't imagine why you'd want to use Erlang for a 
system other than a system that takes advantage of all the difficult 
stuff, while I can easily imagine using C# to do nothing more than a bit 
of simple XML parsing or some file management sort of thing.

It's entirely possible I'm reading Erlang docs in the wrong order. :-) 
I'm still trying to figure out where the parser is described. Various 
routines seem to imply you can add your own parsing to the language 
("behaviors" and "records" come to mind), as well as manipulating 
parse-trees, and I'm curious to see what that's all about.

> Perhaps what bothered you is that the unmaintained docs are kept in PDF files
> without links rather than a cross-referenced tree-based Windows Help file?

No, they have fine cross-references. It's just hard to know where to 
start. In retrospect, starting with kernel and stdlib is probably best, 
but I figured that out by reading the part in the release management app 
that said you had to include those in every release. :-)

>> I think for anything particularly useful, you're going to have big
>> libraries anyway.
> 
> I didn't say otherwise.  I said .NET is closed and non-standardized and C#
> without it is like bread and no butter -- well, much worse actually...

Yeah. And Erlang without the standard libraries (including gen_server, 
sasl, etc) isn't especially useful either.

> Actually, the thing that p*** me off about Java libs or .NET or even Python etc
> is that they're all just a bunch of redundant -- but perhaps a bit more
> convenient -- wrappers to existing OS functionality.

I would disagree. Certainly a large part of what you might use in some 
types of programs is like that. But if you're writing an ASP.NET 
program, most of the stuff you're doing has zero to do with the OS. 
Indeed, for that stuff, I understand that the executables are directly 
portable between MS's .NET and Mono.

> In the case of Java or Python at least, this leads to cross-platform ease.  

Yeah, right. Let me know when you have cross-JVM ease, let alone 
cross-platform ease, with Java.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     "That's pretty. Where's that?"
          "It's the Age of Channelwood."
     "We should go there on vacation some time."

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