Re: occam REPL

[Matt Jadud <mcj4@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Marc,

Marc L. Smith wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I've been following this most recent thread regarding a REPL for occam, 
> and Damian's last post triggered me to recall that there *is* an 
> experimental language within DrScheme that is an implementation of 
> Functional Reactive Programming. The language is FrTime (pronounced 
> "Father Time"), and I saw a demo of it a couple of years ago. The demo 
> showed off features that would appear to be desirable for an occam REPL 
> as this thread has discussed. 

I think the bigger questions is whether a REPL is actually worth the 
investment of time and effort? What problems does it solve? Who would 
use it? Certainly, it would require a non-trivial investment of time to 
convince the compiler to byte-compile on a line-by-line basis, and for 
the TVM to support that kind of incremental compilation in a sane way. 
FrTime has the benefit of expanding down to PLT Scheme, which (as Scheme 
implementations go) was intended for this kind of linguistic exploration.

Java took off just fine without a REPL. I don't think OCaml has one, 
either... and, for that matter, Perl doesn't have a REPL, but it has 
practically taken over the world of scripting. These languages do just 
fine within their spheres. Someone would have to convince me of why a 
REPL for occam is a truly interesting idea, as it doesn't seem all that 
exciting to me.

Cheers,
Matt