Re: language theory regarding Perl/Ruby in universities ?

On Feb 19, 9:14 am, A.L. <f...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Mon, 19 Feb 2007 14:06:25 GMT, Patricia Shanahan <p...@xxxxxxx>
wrote:



"Programming language theory (commonly known as PLT) is a branch of
computer science which deals with the design, implementation, analysis,
characterization, and classification of programming languages and
programming language features."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_language_theory

I didn't know that this stuff was promoted to "science". Anyway, such
many things have been promoted to "science", that there is no room for
astonishment...



Your posting seems to me to be rather clear proof that it is possible to
make programming language theory statements about Ruby and Perl.

Maybe. But I personally will strongly object calling this "theory".

Of course, in an academic setting one would expect some supporting
evidence. For example, "Nothing new in any aspect" might be justified by
listing the features of Ruby, or Perl, and comparing them to features
that had appeared in programming languages prior to the language being
discussed.

And this is science?... Hmm...

A.L.


I know that Perl has alot of usefull features and is very strong at
text processing and pattern matching, that there are numerous modules
on CPAN (comprehensive perl archive network) that you can install to
do all sorts of processing. I was very impressed with the Perl
XML::Twig module that seems like the most powerfull XML processing
tool I've ever seen and once you understand Perl it is easy to use.
I've done reading and writting excell spreadsheets very easilly in a
few lines of Perl code. Perl::DBI is a very powerfull interface to SQL
databases. It seems like Perl is ideal for medium sized tasks, and
that the amount of Perl code is probably something like 1/6 the amount
of comparable Java code. However, the lack of type checking might mean
that once your Perl program reaches 5,000 lines or so, the likelyhood
of more bugs may increase due to that. Although perhaps that would be
comparable to something like a 30,000 line Java program.


Damien Conway was a professor of computer science with a PHD in CS
and has written most of the advanced Perl books out there including
object oriented Perl stuff. He has written Parse:RecDescent, a
powerfull recursive descent parser much like yacc in Perl which I
found very impressive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damian_Conway


I will say that object oriented Perl is pretty good, it has
inheritance, but it is still kind of a hack. Ruby improves on that
quite a bit.

Nothing I have said is really objective, but I do feel it would be
usefull if someone analyzed Perl like languages to a greater extent in
an academic kind of way.

.

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