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From: aaron@funcity.njit.edu (Aaron Watters)
Subject: Re: Extension/Scripting language comparisons
Message-ID: <1995Jul11.174636.19144@njitgw.njit.edu>
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Date: Tue, 11 Jul 1995 17:46:36 GMT
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In article   writes:
>To my mind the most telling arguments favoring Scheme over TCL or Perl
>for scripting use are its superior support for prototyping data structures
>and novel flow-control schemata, and superior reflection:  While it is
>simple to represent perl code in strings to be manipulated by perl code,
>it is less trivial to perform the actual manipulations.  Providing better
>encouragement for lexical scoping can't hurt either.

Yep, lexical scoping is nice, and nice, general, easily constructed data
structures can be fun, and it's even more fun to create your
own language by inventing (say) your *very own error handling
techniques*.  But that last one is a bit problematic because
any two programmers will do error handling differently, and the next
programmer to read the stuff will never figure out what the hell
is going on, not to mention the original programmers four days later.
That last one is also the only one that *Python* lacks, and I
think for collaborative software development this lack is probably a
good thing.

Extension languages must also be easily extended with compiled
extensions.  This is the only advantage to tcl in my opinion, and one
disadvantage to perl (as far as I can tell, although I've been told
otherwise by some).  Dunno about others [guile,eg], but I do know that
Python is remarkably easy to extend, and many extensions exists to
prove it.

  http://www.python.org   http://hertz.njit.edu/~aaron
