[Taoscript-lang] For inspirations: 'Frink' language

[Josef 'J. S. <ju...@gm...>]

Hi!

A (more or less) recent freshmeat announcement pointed me to a
programming language called 'Frink'. It is written in Java and has
some interesting features that perhaps may inspire further development
of Tao.

> Frink is a practical calculating tool and programming language
> designed to help us all to better understand the world around us, to
> help us get calculations right without getting bogged down in the
> mechanics, and to make a tool that's really useful in the real
> world.
> 
> Tracks units of measure (feet, meters, tons, dollars, watts, etc.)
> through all calculations and allows you to add, subtract, multiply,
> and divide them effortlessly, and makes sure the answer comes out
> correct, even if you mix units like gallons and liters.
> 
> Arbitrary-precision math, including huge integers and floating-point
> numbers, rational numbers (that is, fractions like 1/3 are kept
> without loss of precision,) and complex numbers.
> 
> Advanced mathematical functions including trigonometric functions
> (even for complex numbers,) factoring and primality testing, and
> base conversions.
> 
> Unit Conversion between thousands of unit types with a huge built-in
> data file.
> 
> Date/time math (add offsets to dates, find out intervals between
> times,) timezone conversions, and user-modifiable date formats.
> 
> Translates between several human languages, including English,
> French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Korean, Japanese,
> Russian, Chinese, Swedish, and Arabic.
> 
> Calculates historical buying power of the U.S. dollar and British
> pound.
> 
> Calculates exchange rates between most of the world's currencies.
> 
> Powerful Perl-like regular expression capabilities and text
> processing.
> 
> Supports Unicode throughout, allowing processing of almost all of
> the world's languages.
> 
> Supports Interval Arithmetic (also known as Interval Computations)
> in calculations, allowing you to automagically calculate error
> bounds and uncertainties in all of your calculations.
> 
> Reads HTTP and FTP-based URLs as easily as reading local files,
> allowing fetching of live web-based data.
>
> Frink is a full-fledged programming language with arrays,
> dictionaries, functions, loops, even object-oriented programming and
> self-evaluation.
> 
> Frink allows Object-Oriented Programming, which allows you to create
> complex data structures that are still easy to use.

Unfortunately I am not yet sure about the license of Frink - it seems
as if one has to look at the jar file to find it out :-< Frink is at

http://futureboy.homeip.net/frinkdocs/

All for now,

Josef 'Jupp' SCHUGT
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