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000007_icon-group-sender _Wed Jul 2 17:37:28 1997.msg
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Received: from kingfisher.CS.Arizona.EDU by cheltenham.cs.arizona.edu; Wed, 2 Jul 1997 16:58:38 MST
Received: by kingfisher.CS.Arizona.EDU; (5.65v3.2/1.1.8.2/08Nov94-0446PM)
id AA21177; Wed, 2 Jul 1997 16:58:38 -0700
Date: Wed, 2 Jul 1997 17:37:28 -0500
Message-Id: <199707022237.RAA04514@axp.cmpu.net>
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From: gep2@computek.net
Subject: Scripting paper
To: icon-group@cs.arizona.edu
X-Mailer: SPRY Mail Version: 04.00.06.17
Errors-To: icon-group-errors@cs.arizona.edu
Status: RO
>Icon types:
I thought perhaps Icon devotees would like to take a look at
http://www.sunlabs.com/people/john.ousterhout/scripting.html
which talks about Perl, Tcl, Java and C as scripting languages.
Where, if at all, do we think Icon fits into this picture?
One could fairly ask the same question regarding SNOBOL4/SPITBOL and Limbo, for
that matter.
I think that it's fairly preposterous that a poorly-conceived language like Perl
has become so widely used for CGI scripting, despite either S*BOL or Icon being
so much better suited.
We've discussed this issue before here on this list. I think we ought to put
serious effort into making Icon more "CGI-friendly", among other things making
the interpreter re-entrant (or at least serially reusable) so that one copy of
it can be kept in memory, and run against small code files. Then there should
be whatever layers of glue/interface code are needed (if any) to facilitate its
use for CGI scripting.
In the more general case, I think that Icon is not nearly as limited (i.e.
regarding suitability for applications use) as some of these other
scripting-flavor languages are. (I thought the author's suggestion that JCL was
ever INTENDED as a "scripting language" was fairly ridiculous).
I can only presume that languages like S*BOL and Icon would be far more widely
used if more people knew about them.
Gordon Peterson
http://www.computek.net/public/gep2/
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