Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
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From: greg@huia.canterbury.ac.nz (Greg Ewing)
Subject: Re: Design of a New Language: 2
Message-ID: <CG9DF9.5oL@cantua.canterbury.ac.nz>
Nntp-Posting-Host: huia.canterbury.ac.nz
Reply-To: greg@huia.canterbury.ac.nz (Greg Ewing)
Organization: University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand
References: <CG96Mq.1xs@cantua.canterbury.ac.nz> <CG97IE.2GH@cantua.canterbury.ac.nz>
Date: Wed, 10 Nov 1993 04:21:08 GMT
Lines: 38

In article <CG97IE.2GH@cantua.canterbury.ac.nz>,
cctr120@cantua.canterbury.ac.nz (Brendon Wyber) writes:
|> The Alan approuch is far too limiting. With the TADS style libraries you can
|> see what is going on.

I fully agree that Alan as it stands is too restrictive. The question is
whether there are any good things in Alan that can be adopted? And if
so, can Alan be modified into something more useful, or would it be
better to start again with a fundamentally different design?

There are many parts of Alan that I like. It has very natural ways
of expressing the most common things, e.g. the way verbs are divided
into CHECK and DOES sections, the way you can attach ELSE clauses
in various places where things might go wrong, and so forth.

Tads has mechanisms which are functionally equivalent, but much
more difficult to learn, and remember, how to use. The flexibility
of Tads is two-edged. It is easy to make the library big and complicated,
so it gets that way, and it's *not* always so easy to see what's going
on! Sorry, I'm starting to rant.

Anyhow, I want to pick the best parts of both approaches and somehow
merge them. But what *are* the best parts?

Opinions heard so far:

	* Static type checking is good
	* Tads-style flexibility is good

Does anyone else like anything about Alan, or am I the only one?

|> Brendon Wyber                     Computer Services Centre,
|> b.wyber@csc.canterbury.ac.nz      University of Canterbury, New Zealand.

Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, +--------------------------------------+
University of Canterbury,	   | A citizen of NewZealandCorp, a	  |
Christchurch, New Zealand	   | wholly-owned subsidiary of Japan Inc.|
greg@cosc.canterbury.ac.nz	   +--------------------------------------+
