some HLL comments

[Jecel Mattos de Assumpcao Jr.]

I haven't been able to read the very latest versions of the WWW
pages as the local server insists on giving me cached ( old ) versions
of the pages :-(

Anyway, I would like to make a few comments on what I have seen so
far.

I think that the requirements are too ambitious. The multiple syntax
thing, the pledge to run on obsolete hardware, etc... You will find
that 20% of your goals will take up 80% of your effort without
proportional gains. Find out what you can live without and leave it
for version 2.0.

It is not clear to me whether Tunes uses an open stack or a framed
stack model. The example you gave had both FORTH and C semantics. They
are *not* compatible. It is very hard to distribute computation in
the FORTH model because you can't do remote proceedure call kind of
things. You can't know how many arguments a proceedure will take
except by running it! Of course, C is not very simple either ( printf )
but it is more static.

About C compatibility - this is an illusion, but you saw this. People
talk to me about running C but forget that there is malloc/dealloc or
Mac/Windows memory management, stdio or X widgets or ...., parallelism
through PVM or Linda or "by hand" over tcp/ip or....
C + Posix as you seem to indicate is a reasonable target.

Regards,
-- Jecel