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Re: Programmers requested for dictionary

From:Boudewijn Rempt <bsarempt@...>
Date:Friday, October 27, 2000, 19:40
On Fri, 27 Oct 2000, H. S. Teoh wrote:

> Hmm... I propose we use Perl for this project, since Perl is very > well-suited for lotsa text-processing, such as we have here, and it's also > interpreted, which means that Perl programs are cross-platform by default. > Of course, parts of an implementation may use platform-specific features, > but if we carefully keep ourselves to the platform-independent libraries, > we should be OK.
I don't think Perl is really suited to anything larger than ten-liners... That's why I chose Python for Kura.
> > The drawback is, Windows doesn't come with Perl by default, so the > Windowers among us would have to spare enough space to install Perl... > (and no, I *don't* suggest using Perl-to-C translators because I suspect > that'd be heavily POSIX-biased, and would easily break under Windows.) >
Now that gw-basic has been kicked out (NT 4 still had it), Windows doesn't come with anything useful for programming. But you're allowed to package up Python with your app as one installable. I don't know whether that holds for Perl, too.
> Another possibility is Java, but quite frankly, I hate Java when it comes > to text-processing. <rant> Java is too ideal and extremely verbose. While > I admire the purity of its design, I cannot tolerate its verbosity, > especially when it comes to text-processing. The default string libraries > leaves a LOT to be desired... especially if we're talking about conlangs > and unusual orthographies here. I'd sooner code in C or C++ with their > pointer perils... at least I've programmed in them long enough to have > earned a little mastery on how to fix obscure bugs. But I find Java just > too, too verbose, and its militant conventions such as forcing one class > definition per file drives me up the wall incessantly. </rant> >
I earn my daily crust as a Java developer - creating an application around intelligent mobile agents. I've seen people do wonders with Java, and it supports Unicode, at least, but it's so bloated - everything, the runtime, the libraries, the API's, everything except the language definition itself. And it's so static, compared to the dynamicity of OO-programming in Python. I love being able to create dictionaries of classes and creating objects from them. Boudewijn Rempt | http://www.valdyas.org