"Bazar" proposal

[Lee Salzman]

(Mailing list problems, if this gets posted twice, I apologize)

>I have been working independently on some Tunes-based concepts and I must
>admit (I guess I will be flamed :-) that I find Slate much too rich for a
>language to base Tunes on.

I would argue that Slate is even more simplistic than Bazar (making
Bazar the intrinsicly richer of the two). In a general sense, Slate
works very similarly to a linear graph reduction machine, where each
object may be interpreted as a node of a graph and each attribute/slot
of the object may be seen as terminal. Specifying a MOP in Slate is
closely similar to specifying a graph reduction rule under this
interpretation. Also in your concept page you explain nothing of
how these rules are provided for in Bazar. Could you elaborate, please?

>This idea that there is not one solution which is the best in all cases
>extends to my opinion to the programming language : I like Slate's complex
>metasystem, message-passings, attributes, etc., but all this should not in
>my opinion be part of the very language we base all Tunes on.

The meta-system is quite simple. Each object has a meta-object that
defines what an attribute of an object means and what the application
of an object means -- no more, no less. As for message-passing, there is
no set way to provide for this in Slate (as subject that me and Brian
have grappled with a great deal), but OTOH, this allows for great
flexibility for extending what exactly a message is by changing
the objects that implement such. It doesn't necessarily seem that
Bazar avoids these issues to me, though.

>Armin.

Lee Salzman (lee.salzman@lvdi.net)