PLNews: Programming Language News

An article entitled "A Logo interpreter under 400 lines" is now available. It describes the implementation of a small Logo interpreter written in F#.

Dr. Dobb's Portal is running an article entitled 'Smalltalk: Requiem or Resurgence?', by Jeremy Chan. It gives an overview of the history and philosophy of Smalltalk, in addition to some discussion as to why it remains a relatively obscure language today.

IBM developerWorks is running an article entitled 'Embeddable scripting with Lua', by Martin Streicher. It gives an introduction to Lua, a dynamically-typed scripting language offering object-oriented capabilities, designed for extending applications.

The article introduces the Lua language itself, and also discusses embedding the interpreter within a C program.

ONLamp.com is running an article entitled "Introducing Lua", by Keith Fieldhouse. Lua is a dynamically-typed scripting language offering object-oriented capabilities, designed for extending applications.

The article gives a brief introduction to the goals of Lua and the implementation, and also lists some notable users. The basics of the language are covered, including a number of examples. There is also some discussion of embedding and extending Lua, as well as links to Lua-related resources that may be useful.

Guy L. Steele, Jr., a co-creator of Scheme, has written an article entitled "Thoughts on Language Design: New challenges require new solutions".

He starts by recounting the debate that surrounded the goto statement in the 1960s and 1970s. He then proceeds to suggest that we may need future languages that "better support multiple threads of control and deal with the consequences of unordered actions." There is some discussion of languages where parallelism is the default, such as for control structures. Finally there is some focus on the actual presentation of source code, and the possibility of using Unicode to make languages easier to read and write.

Kartik Vaddadi has written an article entitled "A Comparison of Ruby and Boo". It compares the Boo and Ruby programming languages, focusing on topics such as: macros, reflection, metaprogramming, method calls, multimethods, encapsulation, threading, Unicode support, mixins, implementations, performance, and more.

Jess Garms and Tim Hanson have written an article entitled "Experiences with the New Java 5 Language Features". It describes their experiences writing a Java 5 compiler using Java 5. It covers the benefits, drawbacks, implications and uses of the various new Java 5 features, including the enhanced for loop, annotations, enumerations, varargs, covariant returns, generics, and more.

An article entitled "What Are Generics?", by Jesse Liberty, is now available. It gives a brief overview of generics in .NET, including their use when developing type-safe collections. The code examples are in Visual Basic 2005.

A presentation (.ppt) by Herb Sutter discussing the future of C++ is now available.

The presentation includes discussion about 'for each' loops, automatic type inference, lambda functions, concepts, concurrency, and more.