Introduction and misc ideas

[Armin Rigo]

Hello,

Alexis Read wrote:
> Language independent aka inventing a new 'superset' language no?

I do not agree that language-independance means inventing a new superset
language. We need ways to express bridges between them, and even
imperfect bridges when the concepts do not match a priori. I dislike the
idea of taking a single (however powerful) language as a foundation.

> XSLT has no reflective capability that I can see, hence extending the
> language won't be that clean.

I have found a stricking closeness between John Hughes's paper (link in
previous e-mail) and "Reflection-Oriented Programming" by Sobel and
Friedman, and althought Hughes' arrows seem to allow a more abstract and
more powerful way of doing what Sobel and Friedman do, he never talks
about reflectivity. In fact I guess that the arrows formalism could be
the correct way to introduce reflectivity in any functional language
that can support it.


Armin.