[Seaside] Re: Graphing in Javascript

[Marcus Denker]

On 17.12.2005, at 21:56, Serge Stinckwich wrote:

> Bert Freudenberg wrote:
>> Babel is a SMACC-based parser/compiler framework which lets you  
>> use other than Smalltalk syntax (e.g. Logo, JavaScript, Python,  
>> Ruby syntax) to code in Squeak. Babel was developed by impara  
>> (sponsoring Marcus Denker). It's included in Croquet for quite a  
>> while now,  but as Todd said, it's far from complete.
>
> It was just an experiment or the Croquet guys want to continue the  
> developement of such a beast sometimes in the future ?
>

It's an experiment at this stage. The idea back then was to see how  
much would be needed to build kind of "language skins" in Squeak. The  
system did not
go very far into providing the exact semantics, but it's more like an  
other syntax on top of the standard Squeak object model. So the next  
step (besides debugging
the syntax and completing it) would be to implement 100% (or quite  
near) semantics of those languages... just going to 80% won't do it,  
as people
who would use these other languages would want to be able to just  
pick up a book on e.g. python and type in the examples. And  
implementing those
languages completely is a huge piece of work, as it requires not only  
the runtime but big junks of the libraries (they are written in C in  
python...).

So: A lot of work, but it would be quite interesting to have that, I  
think. Especially for Croquet, there will be a lot of people who are  
more artists than hackers,
they know javascript (from the flash stuff), but they won't be happy  
to learn someting else.

As for the future plans of croquet wrt. to that stuff: No idea.

        Marcus