Newsgroups: comp.lang.dylan
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!howland.reston.ans.net!news.sprintlink.net!pipex!uunet!sytex!smcl
From: smcl@sytex.com (Scott McLoughlin)
Subject: Re: Where was Dylan as OOPSLA?
Message-ID: <Js1oVc1w165w@sytex.com>
Sender: bbs@sytex.com
Organization: Sytex Access Ltd.
References: <DLW.94Nov11170645@butterball.odi.com>
Date: Sat, 12 Nov 1994 19:46:42 GMT
Lines: 43

dlw@odi.com (Dan Weinreb) writes:

> So is it really your impression that Visual Basic is too inexpressive
> for the needs of MIS, or is the real problem not so much the Visual
> Basic language as the need to use relational databases to store
> complex structures that require many-way-joins?

Howdy,
        Thanks for the clarification on Object Design. Congrats.
        Yes. VB's "inexpressiveness" is part of the problem. The
partner I mentioned in my last post is the real VB expert. He
makes pretty good money groking C hacks to get around VB's limitations.
I'd give more informative examples here, but he's in France.
        The big problem seems to be lack of indefinite extent
(pointers to heap allocated data). He has described weird hacks 
using controls as variables because controls can be created and
destroyed sort of like pointer data. Sorry, I don't know the
details.
        Another problem is error handling. He's described
various problems with VB's on-error/goto construct that's
led to problems with infinite loops, which in turn effectively
crash the app which seems to leave live Oracle processes on
the server which eventually require a server reboot or 
some such. Once again, sorry I don't have details, but it
was serious enough for him to require me to add CL's
condition handling to our LinkLisp product. Of course,
UNWIND-PROTECT get's one a nice degree of safety in any
case, quite cheaply in our implementation.
        Think of it this way, comparing the language's and
the DB's functionality. "We'll we've got this nice n-ary
tree of scheduling information on our database server
using Object Design's OODBMS, but all we've got is an
array of structures to model data. How do we read in 
the data and manipulate it?" You can hack pointers 
to a single type using indexes, but this is a heavy
duty Fortran style hack. Most MIS guys/gals don't
grok these kinds of hacks, so folks do without 
and/or waste dollars as projects flounder.

=============================================
Scott McLoughlin
Conscious Computing
=============================================
