On Sun, 30 Dec 2001 23:10:27 GMT, David Alan Black <dblack / candle.superlink.net> wrote: >Let's say Ruby and Python merge. At that point, someone who finds >deficiencies in that composite language (and there's no such thing as >a language in which nobody will find deficiencies, and there never >will be) decides to write a new language, which might borrow from the >Ruby/Python composite and from other languages but won't be identical >to any of them. Hmm, I wonder if it wouldn't be more productive to find some commonality on the back end. Like maybe some "standardized" byte code so that you could code one module in Ruby, one in Python, one in Perl depending on what is best for the particular task. Maybe the syntax of the various scripting languages is too diverse to use all the modules from any client.. I dunno'. I'm not a yacc user so I don't know how hard it would be to wrap the compiled modules to make them automatically acceptable. For procedural compiled languages it seems easier. At least TopSpeed used a common code generator in the PC world. I love mixing and matching so I'd rather see something like common code generation than some language merging anyway. Mike -- "I don't want to belong to any club that would have me as a member." -- Groucho Marx