[self-interest] Small announcement

[First Speaker Schol-R-LEA;2]

At 11:32 01/01/2001 -0800, Kyle wrote:
>
>I'm in San Francisco.  We should meet some time.  Drop me a note.  Jecel and 
>I actually met in person for a few short weeks a few years ago in Brazil.  
>Even though we couldn't "geek" as much as we might have liked (my wife was 
>there too), the few hours we spent in front of a computer were quite 
>productive.  I've always been a "whiteboard" kind of guy and find that 
>talking this over with others with a whiteboard helps moving things forward 
>much more quickly.

I would like to sit in on such a meeting myself. I have been considering a
language design based on prototyping and implmented with partial
compilation/JIT compilation and metaobject threaded interpretation. The
programs would compile first to a platform-independent description of
syntax and semantics (similar to the 'slim binaries' used in some
implementations of Oberon), which would be compiled again into a
stand-alone executable. Internally, the interpreter would be a meta-class
of the base 'Object' class. Methods would pass right to left, with any
invocation of objects without a method passed to them returning a reference
to the object. As a rough example of one syntax I've been considering:

HelloWorld := Program new: [
   "Hello World!" show;
 ] end: HelloWorld;

As you can see, I'm looking at a combination of Smalltalk and Pascal style
syntax (note specifically the 'positive close' at the end). While it's not
clear here, my ideas are also heavily influenced by Scheme; the brackets
enclosing the program body, in fact, form a a list literal. I'd been
considering a LISP-like syntax as another possible approach, but I have
serious reservations about it. While I am willing to try out more than one
language concept, perfectionism, combined with a lack of time and/or
self-confidence, has held me back from experimenting. Seeing what others
are doing or considering might just get me finally started...

ObSelf: I would also like to contribute to any attempt at either a Linux or
a Windows port of Self.


J Osako
Operating Systems Designer, Notational Engineer, Generalist
http://www.slip.net/~scholr/