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Vyper is missing

In case any language collector around here still has a copy of Vyper (the Python interpreter written in Ocaml by John Skaller that used to live at http://vyper.sourceforge.net/) flying around: Don't delete it, it may be the last existing copy, since neiter the author nor sourceforge still have one.

(So much for the permanence of electronic reccords in the internet age...)

By Florian Hars at 2004-07-29 10:08 | LtU Forum | previous forum topic | next forum topic | other blogs | 9301 reads

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Figures...

I would learn of something like this just after it disappeared. It sounds fabulous. Has anyone got a copy?
I would like to look at it for some research of my own.

By icosahedron at Fri, 2004-07-30 16:40 | login or register to post comments

I might still have it somewhere

I'd have to look at home. As I recall, I didn't end up doing much with it, partly because the vyper sources were tangled up inside Skaller's "Interscript" literate programming system, which required gtk, which didn't work at all on Mac OS X at the time. Performance was said to be about 10x slower than CPython.

By Doug Landauer at Fri, 2004-07-30 19:34 | login or register to post comments

vyper ... found

Since I had Important Other Stuff to do, I figured I ought to look again, and this time I located the vyper that I had downloaded in 2002. I put it up on the web (.tgz file), along with a weblog entry that mirrors the readme file that I wrote about it.

Folks interested in Vyper might also want to check out Skaller's more recent Felix language (previously mentioned on LtU here and here.

I'd be interested to see an article comparing Felix with Walter Bright's "D Programming Language" (mentioned on LtU recently, as "1.0" status was bestowed upon it).

By Doug Landauer at Sun, 2007-01-21 03:18 | login or register to post comments

If anyone finds a copy ..

please let me know .. people keep asking for it, no idea why. Sourceforge deleted it in a purge of dead projects, and I guess I delete my own copy, due to lack of disk space.

BTW: interscript doesn't need GTK. There is, however, some bindings for GTK in Vyper based on MLGtk (also defunct) so you'd probably need to remove this code to build it.

Quite a few of the enhancements in Vyper actually made it into Python when Guido van Rossum relinquished control of it -- lexical scoping for example (well, at least for functions).

Because it is a term calculator built on top of Ocaml, I considered Stackless Python (which is built on top of a low level continuation passing model) the way forward, and Vyper a dead end.

Felix, which is a kind of ML wrapper around C++, does provide a stackless model however. (see http://felix.sf.net)

By skaller at Sat, 2004-08-07 12:45 | login or register to post comments

D vs Felix

Well, I'm not a D programmer, but D is basically a minor variation on C++, in particular it is OO.

Felix is more focussed on functional programming and user space threading (fibres). Especially now the svn version provides typeclasses which are used to model STL containers. Typeclasses can contain checkable axioms: perhaps this is the first production language where datatype semantics can be both specified and checked: most languages only allow interface specification.

The other difference goes the opposite way: Felix is designed to bind easily to and 'inline' C and C++, and uses the native C++ object model.

By skaller at Sun, 2007-01-21 09:06 | login or register to post comments