Fat language features.

[bhyde@thailand.Gensym.COM (Ben A. Hyde)]

It seems polite to take Dylan on it's own terms and not attempt to
ask it to be something else.

Dylan, it seems to me, attempts to be the C (or maybe C++) of dynamic
languages.  Big complex features, like eval, fall out of the design
because of this.

It doesn't take much wit to pile on requests for big complex features.
Just pick some chapter in your favorite big language.  Ada... tasking 
and generics?  C... concise infix notation?  Lisp... deftype, eval, 
format?

My favorite list of big features comes from things I always seem to
build when ever I implement an application.  How about: extremely fast 
document save and restore, undo, micro-tasking, built in support for
styles, or hypercard style inheritance?

Most big features like these would be hard work to implement in C or
Dylan.  Most of them could have a better implementation if the base 
language included them.  Neither of these is a good reason to push
Dylan away from the goal of being the C of dynamicly typed languages, 
i.e. the one the wins in the marketplace.

  - ben hyde