two questions

[Matthew Tuck]

"Sami Mäkelä" wrote:

> 1. why Ultra? what would make Ultra so great that everyone would use
> it instead of Oberon2, Modula3,  Obliq, O'Caml , Dylan etc?

Well if anyone can show me a compiler that can do what I want it to then
I'll shut shop right now.  It's about incremental improvements, and I
think we can either (a) break new ground or (b) bring a good language to
the people.  The fact that there are people here indicates they think so
too.

We're not really inventing much that's new, but rather slightly
extending existing concepts, and taking inspiration from many places.  I
think if you're doing that, rather than writing a "successor" language,
even if not backward compatible (i.e. Ada from Pascal) then you're not
doing too badly.

What Hans-Dieter said before about a vision would certainly be a good
idea too.

> 2. have you heard of TUNES language/OS project? their web site is at
> http://www.tunes.org.  they have lots of good ideas about what
> features the languages of future should have.

Yep I have heard of TUNES.  I know they've got a more OS slant on things
although they are certainly interested in languages.  Although the
language and the OS are certainly getting closer together through large
libraries (which is why some people say Java will kill MS), there's
still a difference ...

>From what I've seen they're very interested in reflection.  That's
certainly worthy and I think there should be reflection in Ultra, but
from what we've discussed here we have a slightly different slant on
what we want to do, at least at first.  In fact I occasionally read the
tunes mailing list, and although we are both interested in the same
things, it seems we talk about different things!

I don't see a major problem in any friendly competition that might arise
in any areas that do overlap, it can't hurt either group I don't think,
as I am happy with mutual coexistence and even cooperation.  If they
have ideas that work better than ours, we'll take them, and hopefully
vice versa.

Also, I have an interest in cultivating those who perhaps are not
knowledgeable on language design and getting them interested and
understanding.  I haven't seen this from the TUNES project.

> PS. TUNES and some other OS projects are discussed at
> irc.openprojects.net (channel #tunes).

I haven't heard of that irc server before.  Thanks!

> ultra people would be welcome there.

I don't have any problem with people being members of both projects. 
The worthiness of both should be judged by the members on merit.

-- 
     Matthew Tuck - Software Developer & All-Round Nice Guy
                              ***
       Check out the Ultra programming language project!
              http://www.box.net.au/~matty/ultra/