[PLUG] Brain the size of a planet

Russell Senior seniorr at aracnet.com
Wed May 4 17:16:20 UTC 2005


>>>>> "M" == M Edward (Ed) Borasky <znmeb at cesmail.net> writes:

Russell> Speaking of Lisp (etc), has anyone else taken a look at the
Russell> new Fortress language specification[1]?  I *really* like the
Russell> way this Steele guy (heh) thinks.

Russell> [1] <http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/view/673> and
Russell> <http://research.sun.com/projects/plrg/fortress0618.pdf>

M> Bah! As a recovering FORTRAN programmer, I can only say that what
M> high-performance computing exactly *doesn't* need is another
M> language!  [...]

Yeah, but have you read the spec?

M> That said, I'm also a big fan of programming language research,
M> because that's where ideas come from. My own personal favorite
M> right now is R (http://cran.us.r-project.org) for a variety of
M> reasons. The way R (and its commercial cousin S-Plus and ancestor
M> S) does object-oriented programming is unique, but just about
M> everything else there looks a lot like most of the Algol
M> descendants we use today: C/C++, Pascal, Ada, Perl ...

I am familiar with R.  I've been using it (off and on) since about
v0.5.  Its object model is Lisp-inspired (a la CLOS) with generic
functions, methods and slots.  R's vector abstraction is kind of nice.
Historically it has been a little bit limited in the way it deals with
memory.  Used to be the whole problem needed to fit into memory.  Not
sure how that's doing these days.


-- 
Russell Senior         ``I have nine fingers; you have ten.''
seniorr at aracnet.com



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