# Re: [stack] Digest Number 135

## srenner@mail.ru — 2001-05-09 13:29:13

    > I also think it is important not to get too stuck inside

    > unix.

    >

    >   - Manfred

     A wonderful sentiment! I have been waiting for this to come up. I wrote a Joy-like language interpreter

    in Oberon last year and will dust it off if anyone wants to try it. The best Oberon system (right now -- Aos

    will be even better) is Native Oberon running natively on Intel-compatible hardware. Given a cheap, slow

     networked PC it should take very little time to install. Perhaps this is not an appropriate thing to say in

     a LIST message, but Manfred is the only one I am really hoping to catch the interest of.

     	Oberon is garbage collected and type safe. Why would anyone want to use C for language research?

     sr

## Manfred von Thun — 2001-05-10 09:03:07

    On Wed, 9 May 2001 srenner@... wrote:

     >                           I wrote a Joy-like language interpreter

    > in Oberon last year and will dust it off if anyone wants to try it. The best Oberon system (right now -- Aos

    > will be even better) is Native Oberon running natively on Intel-compatible hardware. Given a cheap, slow

    >  networked PC it should take very little time to install. Perhaps this is not an appropriate thing to say in

    >  a LIST message, but Manfred is the only one I am really hoping to catch the interest of.

    >  	Oberon is garbage collected and type safe. Why would anyone want to use C for language research?

     Sorry, my mailer seems to chop off the ends of long lines in your input.

    Don't awake the language warriors! These wars can go on for centuries!

    But seriously:

        Lisp, Scheme and Prolog users will say:

            We have garbage collection, we like type leniency,

      	we can live with dynamic typing.

        ML and Haskell users will say:

            We also have garbage collection, and we have

            polymorphic static typechecking.

        Pascal users will say:

            We can write our own garbage collector,

            and we like the unforgiving type checking.

        C user will say:

            We also can write our own garbage collector,

            and we like the lenient static type checking.

        Forth users will say:

            (Billy, you will have to fill this in)

        New superversion of language X users will say:

            We have got the lot, don't use the old X anymore!

            Soon the superversion will conquer the world!

        All language users will say:

            Our language is the best for doing language research.

    Something I have to confess: My first Pascal implementation of Joy

    did not have a garbage collector at all. With virtual memory

    I just allocated a huge array from which all nodes were taken.

    As more and more garbage was created, the still used portions

    became spread over many virtual pages, and I suppose it became

    slower because of that. But heck, if you are just doing experiments

    such fragmentation does not matter, and a huge array lasts for

    10 minutes or so, and that is plenty.

    Why C as the current implementation language? Why English as

    the communication language? For no good reason other than

    everybody does it. Oberon is in many ways better than C, I know.

    And Turkish is in many ways better than English (I jest not,

    I have been told repeatedly by competent linguists). But I

    am hardly the one to convert the world. Such is life, we have

    to live with history.

      - Manfred