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

[Wes Groleau <wesgroleau@despammed.com>]

> > And I don't see either example as being more difficult than
> >   Invoke (Name_Of_File);
> 
> Um.... But that doesn't do the same thing. What do you think the semantics

If Name_Of_File identifies the linked program, it does the same thing.

> of "Invoke" are? Compiling a program and executing it?

No, just what I said they are:

> >   procedure Invoke (Command : String);
> >   pragma Import (C, Invoke, "exec");
> >   -- this won't work, it's merely illustrative


> Well, my point is all these things modify the currently-running program, so
> yeah, it is a lot harder. If you haven't done a lot of work with this type
> of scripting language, then I suspect you aren't really following what I'm
> saying here.

After 10-15 years of Ada and other languages, including the usual
incidental scripting, and having (unfortunately) for the last
three having ksh, perl, and TCL be 75% of my job, I suspect I'm not
is ignorant as you think.

> The rest snipped, because I'm not sure you're making any sense.

Maybe you need to read a little more carefully.

> There's a tremendous difference between linking to DLLs, generating code on
> the fly, and the "exec" system call.

It's certainly true that the extreme case I snipped
is not appropriate for Ada.  That doesn't make the
lesser cases in the previous posts difficult.

Arguing with you is aiming at a rapidly moving target.

"There's a tremendous difference between" the

  source $Filename

that I challenged two posts back and the

> ... declares a new type at run-time
> based on a user's input, perhaps a derived type of a tagged type, and loads
> it into the currently running program, instantiates it, and sticks it into
> an array of heterogenous objects all derived from that type, dynamically
> dispatching to them. ...

of the last post.  Although I could do that in Ada,
too--but again, I would not recommend it.  Because
when you go that far, you ARE getting quite difficult.
And quite inefficient.

-- 
Wes Groleau
http://freepages.rootsweb.com/~wgroleau