Newsgroups: comp.lang.dylan
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From: norvig@comet.menlo.harlequin.com (Peter Norvig)
Subject: Re: Popularity of a language
In-Reply-To: lwv26@cas.org's message of Wed, 31 May 1995 19:42:57 GMT
Message-ID: <NORVIG.95Jun1111933@comet.menlo.harlequin.com>
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References: <1995May31.194257.26804@chemabs.uucp>
Date: Thu, 1 Jun 1995 18:19:33 GMT


In article <1995May31.194257.26804@chemabs.uucp> lwv26@cas.org (Larry W. Virden) writes:

   Also, has anyone in the dylan arena prepared any kind of comparison between
   Dylan and Java?  ...  It appears that Java, having a
   byte code interpreter, may find a niche for itself in terms of exchanging
   small 'scripts' across the internet.  Dylan, being compiled only, will
   not find that as convienent a niche I suspect.

I think of the Java source language and the Java virtual machine (byte
codes) as two separate things.  That means, for example, that if one
preferred to program in Dylan, but wanted to use the HotJava browser,
one could create a back-end for a Dylan compiler that produced Java
bytecode.  This should be easy to do for Dylan (and rather hard to do
for C), because Dylan is a safe language with similarities to the Java
model.


-- 
Peter Norvig                    http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~russell/norvig.html
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