Python not a Very High-Level Language?

[Neel Krishnaswami]

Tim Peters <tim_one at email.msn.com> wrote:
>
> In any case, it's quite rare for any given language to evolve in really
> significant ways; there are strong pragmatic and social forces opposing it.
> Fortran is a good example of an exception -- and many (I'd guess
> overwhelmingly most) old-time Fortran programmers still want nothing to do
> with the language currently called "Fortran".  So it goes!

As possible counterexamples, what about Lisp and C++?

Common Lisp is quite a different Lisp from basically all of the Lisps
that preceded it (eg, it's lexically scoped rather than dynamically
scoped). And on top of that it grew CLOS, which is (again) a pretty
major change -- it was an backward-incompatible unification of the
Common Loops and Flavors object systems. 

And C++ of course defines creeping featurism -- lots of major (and
sometimes not fully thought-out) features have been added to it as
time has gone by: operator overloading, templates, and namespaces, to
name just a few.

> People seeking revolution should look to new languages.  Languages
> Greg didn't mention that should also be mined for inspiration are
> Prolog, Dylan and SETL (the last being as close to a full-blown UHLL
> as I've ever seen).

I know (and quite like) both Prolog and Dylan, but now you've given
me another language to learn. Thanks! 

And now a favor for you: have you heard of Mercury? It's kind of like
a purely declarative Prolog with a higher-order type system designed
along the lines of Haskell or ML.

> After a mere decade <wink> of relentless salesmanship, I think
> there's some marginally slim chance that Icon's notion of generators
> (in their intersection with Sather's notion of iterators) *may* find
> their way into Python2.

Hm. Would a real metaobject protocol (as the offspring of type/class
unification) count as major change?

> IDEs for Python are a different matter, and much should be done to
> make life easier there.

Yes. Smalltalk and Common Lisp are two of the most fun languages to
program in, in large part due to the power of their interactive
environments.


Neel