Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Re: A new Frontier based on Python?
Author: Nicholas Riley Posted: 4/26/2000; 1:32:14 PM Topic: A new Frontier based on Python? Msg #: 16723 (In response to 16720) Prev/Next: 16722 / 16724
Has anyone seriously (other than the eff-bot ;-) considered replacing Frontier's UserTalk language with Python?On the Mac at least, running Python in Frontier would be possible by implementing Python as an OSA dialect, as has already been done (to some extent or other) with JavaScript, Tcl, and Perl. Then just pick Python from the pop-up menu at the bottom of a script window. Ta da.
As an either/or thing, it makes sense. As I've been working back and forth with UserTalk and Python (and Java, Lisp/Scheme, and Objective-C) over the last few months, about the only issues I ever have are typing ":" at the end of an if statement and expecting Frontier to auto-indent. :-)
However, trying to create a language hybrid as a UserTalk "replacement" doesn't make much sense to me. The languages, while sharing a certain amount in syntax, are fundamentally incompatible in several ways. The only way I could think to map Python objects would be to tables in Frontier. The content of the table would be the equivalent of obj.__dict__, and you'd need some way of storing references to methods, but even then, there'd be a lot of typing issues that aren't easily solved.
--Nicholas
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