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Forth like interpreter

Neel Krishnaswami neelk at brick.cswv.com
Tue Mar 21 19:08:50 EST 2000 
William Tanksley <wtanksle at dolphin.openprojects.net> wrote:
> On 20 Mar 2000 09:29:30 -0600, Tres Seaver wrote:
> >William Tanksley <wtanksle at dolphin.openprojects.net> wrote:
> ><snip>
> >>It's interesting that for all the time Lisp people spend talking about
> >>metaprogramming (programs which write programs) the most commonly used
> >>metaprogrammed language isn't even vaguely similar to Lisp.  (Anybody
> >>care to guess?)
> 
> >PostScript -- what did I win? :)
> 
> Here, have some cycles of reversed kielbasa.  And ten Usenet Points,
> redeemable in comp.lang.python for increased local prestige.  Some
> prestige may depend upon your own actions.  Local Prestige may or
> may not have any effect on your actual life (or lack thereof).

I'd disagree with Postscript as the most commonly metaprogrammed
language -- it's almost certainly the Unix shell, which has a
primitive, ugly and basically evil quotation mechanism built in, to
wit:

 $ wc -l `find . -name '*.py'`

But it's still a quotation mechanism, damn it. (Who knows how many
otherwise promising programmers have been convinced metaprogramming is
evil by the example of the shell?)


Neel
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