Re: Objective-C standard

[Jeremy Tregunna]

On 4-Jun-06, at 11:58 PM, Pascal Bourguignon wrote:

There are a lot of programming languages in use today and very popular

that are not standard either: perl, php, ruby, python, etc.

Some other language have international standards, such as Common Lisp,

and are not as popular, even if still successful.

So this really doesn't matter.

You guys seem to be missing what a standard is used for. It's not used to keep a language static, it's used to help other people write other compilers and have them work with other compilers. In this regard, you really have to reverse engineer a lot of ruby or python to write a compiler for those languages, whereas with Common Lisp or Scheme, you don't, you have a specification you can follow which explains things in great detail.

Objective-C is a little unique though, it exists purely as a syntactic extension and a thin runtime layer over C; dare I say it's almost a waste to write a specification.

--

Jeremy Tregunna

jtregunna@blurgle.ca

"One serious obstacle to the adoption of good programming languages is the notion that everything has to be sacrificed for speed. In computer languages as in life, speed kills." -- Mike Vanier