Semantic stumbles (was: A vision for Parrot)

[Cameron Laird]

In article <mailman.1036617428.29604.python-list at python.org>,
Ian Bicking  <ianb at colorstudy.com> does the favor of listing
such key concepts as:
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>almost all characters in its functions, for instance.  Lots of languages
>have different namespaces for functions and variables.  Something like
>Smalltalk has an entirely different notion of method naming, even though
>its semantics are close to these other languages.  It seems small, but
>it's a pain.
>
>There's also issues with errors -- if you want a usable language, a
>traceback like Python's should be a bare minimum in this day.  But what
>does that look like with mixed languages?  What does that even look like
>with one language, ontop of a VM that's meant to be generic?  This is
>often dealt with very poorly as VM developers mostly test with trivial
>and correct programs.
>
>And of course there's a huge number of problems with objects.  Mutable
>vs. immutable strings being a good example -- it's not just a n x m
>problems, it's a straight-up no-good-solution problem.  There's no
>*right* way to deal with this.  Each language means something different
>by "string", and yet it's so important to each language that if you
>expect them to interoperate *at all* you need to deal with that.  Do you
>annotate functions and methods so that some automatic interoperation
>layer can be used?  Do you force users to use awkward constructions,
>exposing the fact that they're accessing another language?  Do you
>create wrappers?  Do you just punt, and assume some simplistic behavior
>will be good enough, even though it's not predictable to the programmer?
>
>C#/CLR I believe has resolved these issues by forcing the languages to
>adapt to a common set of semantics.  I just can't imagine a common set
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Nice collection.  I think it worth repeating.

For more on achieved experience with such attempts at
automatic translation, see the histories of CORBA,
SOAP, ...
-- 

Cameron Laird <Cameron at Lairds.com>
Business:  http://www.Phaseit.net
Personal:  http://phaseit.net/claird/home.html