Extensible programming: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 17:05, 19 November 2006

Revision as of 17:08, 19 November 2006

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Standish attributed the failure of the extensibility movement to the difficulty of programming successive extensions. An ordinary programmer might build a single shell of macros around a base language, but if a second shell of macros was to built around that, the programmer would have to be intimately familiar with both the base language and the first shell; a third shell would require familiarity with the base and both the first and second shells; and so on. (Note that shielding the programmer from lower-level details is the intent of the [[Abstraction (computer science)|abstraction]] movement that supplanted the extensibility movement.)

Despite the earlier presentation of Simula as extensible, by 1975, Standish's survey does not seem in practice to have included the newer abstraction-based technologies (despitethough he used a very general definition of extensibility that technically could have included them). A 1978 history of programming abstraction from the invention of the computer to the (then) present day made no mention of macros, and gave no hint that the extensible languages movement had ever occurred.<ref name="Guarino1978">Guarino, L.R., "The Evolution of Abstraction in Programming Languages", ''CMU-CS-78-120'', Department of Computer Science, Carnegie-Mellon University, Pennsylvania, 22 May 1978.</ref> Macros were tentatively admitted into the abstraction movement by the late 1980s (perhaps due to the advent of [[hygienic macros]]), by being granted the pseudonym ''syntactic abstractions''.<ref name="Gabriel1989">Gabriel, Richard P., ed., "Draft Report on Requirements for a Common Prototyping System", ''SIGPLAN Notices'' 24 no. 3 (March 1989), pp. 93ff.</ref>

== Modern movement ==