Re: Would an *AdaScript* language be a good / bad idea?

[Darren New <dnew@san.rr.com>]

Wes Groleau wrote:
> > languages.) I think this is fairly difficult to do in Ada.

> Kludgey, but it can be done.  And it wouldn't be difficult.

Errr, well, being used to scripting languages, I'd call both of these
"difficult" compared to what you typically do with a scripting language.
Obviously it's not impossible, or you wouldn't be able to write an OS in
Ada, but it's certainly a lot easier to say something like

  source $name_of_file

or 

  MyClass x = new CodeLoader("xyz.class");

or something like that than it is to write the support code it would
take to find an arbitrary Ada source, compile it in a cross-platform
way, write out all your state, invoke the compiled program, and then
somehow clean up all that afterwards, taking care to catch any errors.

Sure, you *can* do it. But how many people *have* done
dynamically-loaded code under Ada, compared to the number of people who
use Tcl or Python or etc, all of which have dynamically-loaded code as
the fundamental way of running a program? Note that in Tcl and Python,
the equivalent of "with" is to dynamically load sources, so it's
happening *all the time*. :-)

Again, this isn't a cut on Ada in any sense. Just pointing out some of
the features of "scripting languages" that aren't well-supported in Ada.
 
-- 
Darren New 
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