mayer@hplabsz.HPL.HP.COM (Niels Mayer) (08/11/90)
In article <J:25_41@xds13.ferranti.com> peter@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) writes: >In a multitasking system with limited resources, too many copies of Xlisp >hanging around together are going to eat your lunch. And, unlike TCL, it's >not really well designed as a shared library. > >(still looking for a reasonably small, portable, and fast extension language) (1) Comment: By the time such a beast is implemented, tested, debugged, documented, used & built into a non-trivial application, machines will be fast enough that all that effort (designing yet another customization lang) will be for nought. And the users of the extension language will end up kludging their way around a castrated, ineffective language that doesn't come close to the power of Lisp/Scheme. And what language semantics do you propose? Interpreter or Compiler? C-like Pascal-Like or Lisp-Like, or perhaps Spreadsheet-programming-language-like, or Prolog-Like, SQL-Like? Or maybe some kludgy hybrid with ill-understood semantics, and no library of pre-existing "how to" books... (2) Comment: Even the low-end systems coming out nowadays are beefy enough to handle a handful of xlisp's running. If you are looking to run this kind of stuff on a machine with 4M of memory, then it may be a problem. Then again X windows doesn't perform decently on a machine with less than 8-12M of memory (assuming local server AND local toolkit-based clients). I'm not claiming that every application needs the full power of WINTERP/Xlisp as a customization environment either. It would certainly be stupid to implement a trivial application like xwebster in WINTERP. However, wouldn't it be nice to have extensive UI and application customizability in, say, an e-mail system, a personal information manager, a calendar/reminder system?? And of course, an editor (e.g. gnuemacs). (3) Comment: Aren't you the guy that is slagging gnuemacs all the time?? Well I guess there's no hope for pleasing you then.... (4) Question: briefly, what does it take to make Xlisp/Winterp "designed as a shared libary?? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Niels Mayer -- hplabs!mayer -- mayer@hplabs.hp.com Human-Computer Interaction Department Hewlett-Packard Laboratories Palo Alto, CA. *