On Mon, 20 Apr 2015 04:07 am, Dan Sommers wrote: > Smalltalk, Forth, and LISP don't follow the program=textfile system > (although LISP can, and does sometimes);
Correct, and the fact that they wrapped code and environment into a completely opaque image was a major factor in their decline in popularity for all three languages. http://www.ianbicking.org/where-smalltalk-went-wrong.html http://www.ianbicking.org/where-smalltalk-went-wrong-2.html Source as text means that you can use any text based tool with little or no effort. Using a non-text binary blob for source code means that your options are much more limited. Look at source control software like git and mercurial (hg): they automatically work on any language based on lines of text code. There is no need for hg-for-java, hg-for-python, hg-for-ruby, hg-for-javascript, hg-for-c, there is just hg. But if languages were image-based like Smalltalk, hg would require special knowledge of the internals of each compiler's image file format. -- Steven -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
