[erlang-questions] Why do we need modules at all?

[jm]

On 25/05/11 5:30 PM, Richard O'Keefe wrote:
>
> The original Smalltalk ran on bare metal.
>
> Interlisp-D ran on bare metal.
>
> Lisp machines ditto.
>
> Lisp is definitely more than an AST written in ASCII, and
> there are several Algol-ish front ends for it.  Reduce
> has (had?) RLisp and Macsyma used CGOL, I think.
>
> The Poplog system ran under VMS, and because they were
Thanks. Now I've got some names I'll do a few searches and read up on 
these. It will be interesting to see how they bootstrapped the set up, 
grew the runtime environment and if they changed the grammar or 
behaviour of the language as they moved away from the bare metal.

I don't mean to be hard on LISP and the SICP seems to be one of those 
books on my reading queue that I never get to. It seems that it's the 
standard answer to problems that "no-one" uses. An Algol-ish front end 
is an intriguing idea if done cleanly.

The other language that I expected to hear was Forth which was getting 
used a lot in embedded applications years ago.

It would be interesting to create some form of plot featuring such 
things as soft real-time, hard real-time, batch, kernel programming, gui 
programming, system management, etc and see if there's a logical 
progression of any form in the desirable or used language/environment 
features.

All this is something for another time I fear.


Jeff.