[Dynamite] July (attn Ewan)

[Ian Holmes]

Just read this mail of Ewan's after already sending my last one - doh

> > > yeah... i really want the dynamite language to *look* like a functional
> > > programming language, but without having to do significantly more coding
> > > ;)
> 
> 
> <grin>. Now I (vaguely) understand what you guys are talking about I
> realise that I don't think that this is "what" dynamite/telegraph is.
> Dynamite/telegraph is quite a tight language for quite a tight problem.
> Even the parts which look like reasonably arbitary maths (ie, calc lines)
> are actually in real-life restricted to quite a small set of
> possibilities.
> 
> In other words - my prejudice is that functional languages specification
> problems cannot get you that far as they too will have difficulty in
> expressing what is going on.

I basically agree with you. I think what this boils down to
(realistically) is how far we deviate from something that looks basically
like a brace-delimited language (or a piece of XML). see prev mail

> > Anyway, I suppose the existing dynamite is kind of a functional language.
> > Well, it isn't imperative.  Hmmm.
> 
> It could be imperative. I think.
> 
> No - wait - the natural thing for dynamite is to be declaritive. Really
> prolog is the best (existing) language for this. I think.
> 
> confused again (doh!)

The transitions can be considered to be rules, and there is a certain
amount of maths that we *do* have to parse to do training properly,
basically the operators '*' '+' '/' (again, see prev mail)

These are quite easily handled using a baby interpreter which i can write
easily enough in perl... the question is just how pretentious we get with
this whole "object functional" buzzword thing.

Ian