Roel Wuyts wrote:
    [Chris Wright wrote]
> > 2) Little Languages
> >
> >>The second part of my question is "What's the ST way of dealing with
> >>little languages. Do you just build editors/inspectors instead?"
> >
> > I don't understand the question exactly. A utterance in a "little language"
> > in this context is a sequence of characters. The lexer/parser builds a tree
> > of objects.
> > With the inspectors you can look at any node of the tree and ask
> > the object to do something. Very convenient when developing.
> 

> I was wondering about the question too. First of all, I do not know what you
> mean by 'little language'. Do you mean that it is not very different of
> Smalltalk's synta ? Do you mean it is something *very* simple ? Second, 'Do
> you just build editors/inspectors instead', I was wondering: 'instead of
> what' ?

By a 'little language' I meant an end-user language that is pretty
domain specific. Typically syntactically trivial, and typically
imperative in style (There was a period of enlightment when they were
often Forth like...but that's a different story!). They are now often
written by embedding Tcl, Guile, or for the enlightened, Python into
applications.

Well, I guess I was wondering how those who live in the Smalltalk
environment and deliver products in ST deal with the issue of "little
languages". The LISP community sometimes defines LISP as a language in
which you write the language to solve your particular problem, and I was
wondering if the ST culture was a little different in this area. Perhaps
the notion of a "new" language isn't relevant...Perhaps the ST way is to
deliver objects that have the intended functionality, and allow end
users to configure those objects with editors, rather than have the end
user write code.

Thanks to all those who have replied. It's a very helpful community.

cheers

Chris

Dr. Chris Wright
Deputy Director, Intensive Care Unit
Monash Medical Centre
Clayton, VIC AUSTRALIA