ActionScript: => was {Re: [Edu-sig] Top 5 All Time Novice Obstacles => #3 Where am I ?}

[Guido van Rossum]

> > I've not looked much at it personally, but I trust a close colleague
> > who has, and who finds it hard to use because the parser cannot know
> > the end of a function's parameter list -- that's only known at run
> > time, once the function is called.  Sounds like dead on arrival to me,
> > as far as language design goes.
> 
> hmm... I do not understand what your friend means about the parser.
> I don't know much about parsers, but will ask around more.

I'm not sure, but I think a Rebol statement can look like

  a b c d

This could mean a(b, c, d) or a(b(c), d) or a(b, c(d)) or a(b(c, d)),
depending on how many arguments a takes and what b and c are.

> Yes I agree, and interesting to see how Java has moved into larger
> server-side component projects and stand-alone applications.

There was a vacuum there waiting to be filled: legacy apps can't
easily publish on the web, and CGI doesn't scale.  The Java folks with
their web foresight jumped into that first and got the market.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)