RE: language extensions? future direction?

Hello Shankar,

I think I understand you very well, I always fear languages that get
every feature everyone can think of, and that is exactly what happens
to Groovy. A new Syntax for everything instead of a simple language.
Smalltalk and Lisp have been simple languages, when you think of
syntactic "features" but were (are) very powerful w.r.t. what you
can achieve.

So I like to stick as close as possible to Java Syntax. I would
even propose, if anyone (me?) adds such a feature, there should be
something like a switch that has to be set to _enable_ 
any additional syntax.

So I will think about these features a little bit further, have 
a closer look at the current parser and the necessary changes in the 
interpreter and come up with a proposal, if I find it worth the 
effort.

Thanks for your comment.
Victor


Zitat von Shankar Unni <[email protected]>:

> >  1. "blocks" like in Ruby or Smalltalk: 
> >  2. "mixins" 
> >  4. "macros" 
> > 
> > What do you think?
> 
> May I make a contrary plea? 
> 
> One of the advantages of BeanShell is that it has maintained its closeness
> to "real Java syntax" all this time. 
> 
> If you want is primarily an exotic scripting language with bells and
> whistles, "groovy" fits the bill quite nicely - it has all these and more.
> Since compatibility with Java syntax and semantics is no longer a primary
> concern, "groovy" could be your answer.
> 
> BeanShell's big virtue is that you can keep the code in near-pure Java, and
> move code back and forth between "compiled" java and "scripted" java freely.
> 
> In any case, if you really want to do all this in *BeanShell* specifically,
> you're welcome to try. Just make sure that ordinary Java syntax is not
> crippled in any way. 
> 
> The other big problem, of course, is that there isn't an established
> protocol yet for large-scale feature additions to BeanShell by anyone other
> than the original Author..



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