Re: [9fans] Re: alef compiler

[rog@vitanuova.com]

> Even if it is a museum piece, if there is some interest wouldn't it be
> good thing to have the code out there?

i'm not sure that -code- is better than -no code-...

deleting code is a wonderful thing!

although i only used alef in passing, i did do a little bit of
exploring around the language, and the impression i got was that the
basics were there, but the vision had faltered somewhat towards the
end.

i think phil had had loads of ideas about what one might do with a
language, but not all of them were fully developed.  for instance, the
polymorphism support was substantially broken, so even if you had the
compiler, you'd still have to fix those bugs...

from my point of view, the basic problem with alef is that it tries to
be too much like C.

in a concurrent programming language, garbage collection and
language support for immutable complex types, such as you get in
limbo, make all the difference.

i'm not sure the distinction between threads and processes is a good
idea either.  it doesn't make for good modularity (no way of telling
if a function you're calling performs a communication or not; no way
of telling if your caller expects to remain in an atomic section).