Re: general-purpose vs. domain-specific programming languages

[dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Marin said

    <<I think my point was that if there were some specific useful
    features of Perl that could be functionally duplicated in Ada, it
    might be worth having a collection like this around. I think the
    original example was to search & replace a string in a text file.
    Without implementing anything more than this, you would have a
    useful tool for Ada programmers.>>

I doubt it is worth having such specific features. I must say I have 
NEVER needed this *exact* function in anything I have written.

But it is reasonable to have the primitives from which this is easily
constructed, and certainly using the pattern matching support in GNAT,
you can easily program this function (and indeed tuck it in a library
if you really think it is something you will often want to do).

    <<I'd hate to try to duplicate all of the functionality of Perl, or
    any other language in Ada - you'd end up trying to do some serious
    tough work which probably would satisfy no one. But individual>>

GNAT implements all the important functionality of SNOBOL-4 (with SPITBOL
extensions), and it was serious tough work, but a lot of people, including
the GNAT project itself, has found it very useful. 

Of course not all of PERL is in SNOBOL4 (and vice versa), but actually I
think a GNAT.Perl library unit that contained useful functionality along
these lines would make very good sense. We are certainly planning some
units of this kind (the spec for GNAT.COBOL is already completed, but who
knows when the implementation will get done?)

A useful thing would be for someone to propose a spec for a Perl interface
....