From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,XPRIO autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 107f24,6f568a2e6507575,start X-Google-Attributes: gid107f24,public X-Google-Thread: f891f,6f568a2e6507575,start X-Google-Attributes: gidf891f,public X-Google-Thread: 103376,6f568a2e6507575,start X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2001-04-24 10:17:23 PST Path: newsfeed.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!news.tele.dk!195.224.53.60!nntp.news.xara.net!xara.net!gxn.net!news5-gui.server.ntli.net!ntli.net!news6-win.server.ntlworld.com.POSTED!not-for-mail From: "chris.danx" Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.functional,comp.lang.misc Subject: Thoughts and Opinions or something like that X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Newsreader: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.50.4522.1200 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.50.4522.1200 Message-ID: Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2001 18:12:37 +0100 NNTP-Posting-Host: 62.253.8.148 X-Complaints-To: abuse@ntlworld.com X-Trace: news6-win.server.ntlworld.com 988132327 62.253.8.148 (Tue, 24 Apr 2001 18:12:07 BST) NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2001 18:12:07 BST Organization: ntlworld News Service Xref: newsfeed.google.com comp.lang.ada:6896 comp.lang.functional:5254 comp.lang.misc:1117 Date: 2001-04-24T18:12:37+01:00 List-Id: Hi, Someone on these news groups suggested to someone that in order to make a reliable Virtual Machines, they needed the opinions of many programmers in many languages. {Can't remember who, some of those threads get huge and i get lost! Good idea who ever it was!} I'm involved in a project to develop a VM and i was looking for peoples thoughts on this. I've started with a simple RISC machine that's not finished yet. I will complete this soon, but i've been thinking my approach is flawed. Not to say RISC is bad, but maybe it's too simplistic or lacks specific support for features that'd make it A:more efficient and B:easier to program. The language project will support the following imperative features: - For/While loops - Procedures - side effect enabled programming (variables) - "tidy" pointers - modes for parameters (only for procedures, functions nonmodified params) - Generitcity (polymorphism) and the following functional features - pattern matching - side effect free programming (values) - higher order functions - guards - Algebraic types - N-Tuples - Genericity (polymorphisism) and the following "not sure" or "in many paradigms" features - Units bound to values/variables - Lists [] - Arrays <> - Records - Sets (and Records as Sets) {} - Enumeration types (with extensiblity and subtyping) - Subtyping - Relational programming (some paper i really liked described it, prologish but somewhat different) This list is quite exhaustive and i know it doesn't look that nice now, but the work i've done so far seems to indicate this is all possible and looks nice too. The major stumbling block is state->stateless programming but i'm looking and trying ideas out. Something will be done; whether or not it's pretty is another matter. I know many folks get annoyed when they here about "yet another new language" but this is not about the language itself. It is about me learning about all this stuff and seeing what i can do with a big collection of (sometimes unrelated) issues and see what can come of it. The real problem is the VM, so i'm looking for peoples thoughts on this. What concepts would you have found useful, and what you'd rule out. Please feel free to ignore this if you don't want to contribute (i know you will anyway). Regards, Chris