In Perl 6, all blocks operate under the same rules. Effectively, every block is a kind of closure that can be run by user-defined constructs as well as built-ins.[Lambda the Ultimate]
I really like how Larry Wall thinks about language design. He really tries to innovate, not just copy features from other languages.
Here's UserLand's Winer talking at Infoworld's Conference on web services. He has some good points to make but then we get the old hobby horse. Pointing at IBM and Microsoft, Winer said WSDL (Web Services Description Language) was invented in such a way that it will only work in Java and .Net environments. "It can't work in a dynamic environment; it's a static interface," he said.
I have to say, I just don't get this. [jbond's blog at voidstar.com]
I think I know what Dave Winer means. Function arguments in most scripting languages aren't typed. This means that you can make an xml-rpc call, using arguments with any of the 6 types available in xml-rpc. The same with SOAP probably. The function will know how to deal with each of them. Apparently Dave says that there's no match-all type in WSDL. Is this true? I don't know.
Friday, January 18, 2002
