Questions on Rite and embedding

[Jeremy Henty]

I read Matz's "How Ruby Sucks"
<URL:http://www.rubyist.net/~matz/slides/rc2003/mgp00003.html> and I
noticed he mentions Ruby suffers from "Bad Embedding", but AFAICT says
nothing about Rite will address this. So I am wondering how does Ruby
currently suck at embedding? And how will Rite do it better?

FWIW I think it sucks that (a) there is precisely one global
interpreter, and (b) there is namespace pollution (eg. TYPE instead of
RUBY_TYPE). I think Tcl does it better by having an explicit
Tcl_Interp type for interpreter handles and prefixing every Tcl type
with "Tcl_". So I would like to know whether this is what Matz was
talking about. Will Rite improve things by being more Tcl-ish in this
respect? Or am I missing the real point here?

Cheers,

Jeremy Henty

 

[Lothar Scholz]

Hello Jeremy,

Friday, January 23, 2004, 12:10:00 AM, you wrote:

JH> I read Matz's "How Ruby Sucks"
JH> <URL:http://www.rubyist.net/~matz/slides/rc2003/mgp00003.html> and I
JH> noticed he mentions Ruby suffers from "Bad Embedding", but AFAICT says
JH> nothing about Rite will address this. So I am wondering how does Ruby
JH> currently suck at embedding? And how will Rite do it better?

JH> FWIW I think it sucks that (a) there is precisely one global
JH> interpreter, and (b) there is namespace pollution (eg. TYPE instead of
JH> RUBY_TYPE). I think Tcl does it better by having an explicit
JH> Tcl_Interp type for interpreter handles and prefixing every Tcl type
JH> with "Tcl_". So I would like to know whether this is what Matz was
JH> talking about. Will Rite improve things by being more Tcl-ish in this
JH> respect? Or am I missing the real point here?

I can only wish that Matz take a look at deepth look at TCL before
doing anything. TCL/TK is from the implementation (not from the
language) still lightyears ahead from ruby.

 

[Jeremy Henty]

I can only wish that Matz take a look at deepth look at TCL before
doing anything. TCL/TK is from the implementation (not from the
language) still lightyears ahead from ruby.

IIRC Matz is a self-confessed language nut, so I am sure he has
already looked at Tcl.

Tcl embeds well because it was originally designed to be an embeddable
component, not a fully-fledged stand-alone language. This has made it
hard for it to evolve from the former into the latter. Any language
that becomes very popular has growing pains, but some of Tcl's initial
design decisions (eg. every value is a string, and so no value is a
reference, no value is a first-class structure and no value is a
closure) have IMHO proved particularly hard to outgrow.

Cheers,

Jeremy