Lambda the Ultimate

The recent discussion of the Chinese natural language included some speculation about what CS would look like had it not been dominated by English discourse.

The critique was raised that one could postulate any number of alternate histories. However, we can do better than pure speculation by looking at natural-language-inspired Programming Languages developed in non-english-based cultures.

To date I have only come acrosss a few such references to Japanse-based experiments in End User friendly programming tools. Unfortunately, they refered to non-english papers that weren't accessible to anyone unable to cross the natural language barrier.

This work was of particular interest because it went beyond the mere transliteration of keywords in Western programming languages. But alas, the references I encountered were little more than second-hand existence proofs of work we should know more about.

If anyone is familar with such efforts, any information and observations you could share would be most deeply appreciated.

One of the important tasks of exception handling is to restore program state and invariants. Studies suggest that this is often done incorrectly. We introduce a new language construct that integrates automated memory recovery with exception handling. When an exception occurs, memory can be automatically restored to its previous state. We also provide a mechanism for applications to extend the automatic recovery mechanism with callbacks for restoring the state of external resources. We describe a logging-based implementation and evaluate its effect on performance. The implementation imposes no overhead on parts of the code that do not make use of this feature.

The authors propose a try_all construct that restores program state, and analyze its semantics. They implemented the proposed construct using Bartok, a research compiler and runtime system for CIL.

I guess some here would see all the work required to implement this construct and the issues it raises as a demonstration of the perils of state...

The article highlights several interesting features of Ruby,

Yukihiro Matsumoto, aka Matz, has said that "The purpose of Ruby is to maximize programming pleasure", and experience has taught me that enjoying the creative process leads to faster development and higher quality code. Ruby features powerful object-oriented abstraction techniques, extreme dynamism, ease of extensibility and an armada of useful libraries. It is a veritable Swiss Army machete, precisely the sort of tool one should bring into uncharted territory such as the NFS-mounted priority queue I was seeking to build...

One of the things to note about this extension is I actually was able to add a method to Ruby's built-in File class. Ruby's classes are open--you can extend any class at any time, even the built-in ones. Obviously, extending the built-in classes should be done with great care, but there is a time and a place for it, and Ruby does not prevent you from doing so where it makes sense. The point here is not that you have to extend Ruby but that you can. And it is not difficult to do...

In Ruby a module not only is a namespace, but it can be mixed in to other classes to impart functionality. The effect is similar but less confusing than multiple inheritance. In fact, Ruby classes not only can be extended in this way, but instances of Ruby objects themselves can be extended dynamically with the functionality of a module--leaving other instances of that same class untouched.