Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
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From: davis@ilog.fr (Harley Davis)
Subject: Re: Extension/Scripting language comparisons
In-Reply-To: alan@lcs.mit.edu's message of 7 Jul 95 02:36:01
Message-ID: <DAVIS.95Jul12111331@passy.ilog.fr>
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References: <3thlus$isi@hpbab.wv> <ALAN.95Jul7023601@parsley.lcs.mit.edu>
Date: 12 Jul 1995 09:13:31 GMT


In article <ALAN.95Jul7023601@parsley.lcs.mit.edu> alan@lcs.mit.edu (Alan Bawden) writes:

   In article <3thlus$isi@hpbab.wv>
   joemu@aardvark.mentorg.com (Joe Mueller) writes:

      I'm in the workgroup within the CAD Framework Inititiative (a standards
      organization for CAD tool developers/users) that is responsible for
      Extension Language selection.  Some time ago we selected Scheme as the
      standard extension language for this organization but have lately come
      under fire for not selecting/considering Tcl and Perl as alternatives to
      "ugly" Scheme. I would like to get a list of pros/cons for Scheme, Tcl,
      and Perl as extension/scripting languages to (hopefully) better defend
      the choice of Scheme....

   You can't defend the indefensible -- Scheme is a terrible choice.
   The most important thing about a extension/scripting language is
   that it be -simple-.  It must have a simple easy-to-understand
   semantics, it must have simple easy-to-use data structures, and it
   must have simple easy-to-read syntax.  Scheme has none of these,
   while Tcl and Perl have them all.  Let's take these aspects of
   simplicity one at a time:

Nice parody.

   Semantics.  Tcl and Perl are based on string substitution.  What
   could be simpler?  Scheme has closures and continuations.  Even
   graduate students at MIT are confused by that stuff.

I think CFI's extended subset Scheme explicitly removed continuations
--- less for confusion than for efficiency, I believe.

   Data structures.  Tcl and Perl have strings.  And basically, that's
   -all- they have.  But strings are universal -- you can represent
   anything using strings.  And strings are simple.  Heck, if
   everything is a string, you don't even need a garbage collector!
   Furthermore, everything else in a modern computer is based on tools
   that consume and produce strings, so Tcl and Perl fit right in.
   Scheme doesn't even have a foreign function interface, so you can't
   glue a Scheme program together with -anything-.

CFI Scheme defines an FFI.

-- Harley Davis
-- 

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