RE: [GD-General] Objective Caml (was Ruby opinions)

[Brian H. <bri...@py...>]

> This is a big practical problem with everything other than 
> C/C++.

And Obj-C =)  And Java's JNI interface, while not perfect, at least
works.  I know Eiffel has some mechanism, but I'm not sure how good it
is.  I've never liked Lua's interface.  That you need to use an external
tool like tolua indicates to me that it's just not doing things the
right way.

> Actually, one thing that bothers me is lack of a native 
> 32-bit float type.  floats in OCaml are 64-bit.  I think that 
> will need to get fixed at some point.

I think new languages (and their designers) strive real hard for
orthogonality and minimizing confusing types, and inevitably practical
considerations rear their heads.  The original DEC Alpha didn't support
byte operations, which made a lot of things REAL slow -- their attitude
was that the future is 64-bit, and dropping back to
conversion/pack/unpack for byte support was just going to be a temporary
thing =)

Not to go off on a tangent, I think Java ditching "unsigned" as a type
was probably a good idea.  IIRC Lua is missing integer support?  That's
a bit of an issue as well.  Or the belief that languages shouldn't have
preprocessors because the C preprocessor was so gross; inevitably you
lose major functionality like "#ifdef 0/#endif" and the language
designers defend it to the end.

Brian