marick@ccvaxa.UUCP (01/01/86)
I hate to wander far afield, but David desJardins responded to the claim that an interpreted language shortens project development time by saying "This is not really true on large projects (large enough to be broken into separate modules)". I disagree. I've worked on large (using his definition) projects that used the edit-compile-test-integrate technique. My current project is a large Lisp system; it's broken into modules and we write our code in the usual Lisp interactive way. As far as I can see, the interactive style is much more productive for programming and some parts of design. Of course, you still must *do* design, and you still must test -- programming is not all there is. Since most languages can be interpreted (some more easily than others), my point isn't all that germane to this argument. Brian Marick, Wombat Consort Gould Computer Systems -- Urbana ...ihnp4!uiucdcs!ccvaxa!marick ARPA: Marick@GSWD-VMS
dgary@ecsvax.UUCP (01/09/86)
Let me jump into this fray with an observation on my biggest
disappointment with Forth: Unless you use bottom-up development you
have to write in an edit-compile-run fashion, just as in other
languages. This is because if A calls B you have to define B before A,
and if you later redefine B, A still calls the old version.
APL (and LOGO and a few non-standard Forths) offer a much nicer
approach. You can write B as a stub routine and redifine it later.
Routine A always calls the latest version of B. This is the way an
interpretive environment should work!
I became a fanatical convert to this point of view when (many years ago
when I had time for such things) I wrote an adventure game development
system in APL. I could build a few rooms, meander around in them
awhile, add a few more, toss in a few new verbs and objects, and so on,
all very interactively and with absolutely no waiting for the computer
to do anything. Programmer heaven!
--
D Gary Grady
Duke U Comp Center, Durham, NC 27706
(919) 684-3695
USENET: {seismo,decvax,ihnp4,akgua,etc.}!mcnc!ecsvax!dgary