Re: proposal: state machine syntax also usable for continue / nested break

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Tue, Feb 1, 2011 at 3:28 AM, Everett L Williams II
<rett@classicnet.net> wrote:
> can certainly sympathize with the wish to classify COBOL as a read-only
> language, but really it is not.

It was an excellent DSL and did what it did very well. The modern
tendency to replace it with Java is understandable, but it's not such
a good fit.

> the constructs available in such languages. The problem with great power is
> that it normally engenders subtle syntax, making readable by only a very
> limited set of readers. That is where lua resides.

Most people would be advised to keep their code as straightforward as
possible, and Lua provides the mechanisms so that a simple subset can
be used, with a little library help.  The essayist Paul Graham writes
about 'keeping programs in your head', (explicitly acknowledging that
people have limited cache) and so the strategy for big programs is to
build a dialect that expresses the domain well.  So the actual core
becomes manageable and fits inside the average programmer's head.

> reasonable effort, figure out how to interface with C or Cpp programs that
> they did not write is not just logically ridiculous, but palpably
> exemplified by the massive systems of code that are out there at the heart
> of so much of our current programming world.

Most of the world is written in C, so that's what we sit on and have
to build abstractions on top of.

steve d.