Eliezer S. Yudkowsky writes:
> Matthew Gingell wrote:
> > Succinctly, what does Flare do that necessitates inventing a
> > completely new wheel?
>
> Quite a number of things. User-supplied annotations do not have a truly
> good or even passable access idiom - including annotation namespacing and
> annotation metadata, for example - in any language of which I am aware.
You ducked the 'what exactly constitutes an annotation' question, so
I'm not sure then what conventions you'd find comfortable for
manipulating or scoping it.
> There are things I expect to do in Flare that I will only be able to do
> in, say, Python by badly reinventing Flare, like trying to write C++
> programs in C. Sure, you can implement your own virtual function tables,
> but do you really want to? Just having a picture in my mind of Flare has
> already led me to write seriously different (and better) Python programs
> with quick-and-dirty emulated Flare behaviors.
> For example, the program that I use to maintain my Webpages
> actually reads in fragments of Python code from an XML file and
> organizes them using the attached attributes. Even without being
> able to use the debugger on those code fragments, there's still
> been an improvement in programming speed just resulting from more
> modular design.
This is generally called a "macro preprocessor." Try not to put your
eye out.
> Frankly, I see no good reason why you have a need to immediately
> hypothesize anything about Flare one way or the other, rather than
waiting
> on further information. Flare simply hasn't made it to the top of my
> to-do list yet, in part because people like you keep asking me to write
> documents, and a lot of those requests have a higher priority than Flare.
Then unsubscribe, do some work, and accomplish something that can
speak for itself. Otherwise, if you want to keep playing visionary,
get used to answering questions about the vision.
> I now politely request that you stop bugging me about this.
Sure - my mistake.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon May 28 2001 - 09:59:56 MDT