Thanks to all who responded with their wisdom.

As part of this mission, I am studying the w3schools.com Javascript course. It looks like javascript is trying to borrow some good ideas from Perl in recent versions (e.g. use strict). Not surprising given some of its original atrocities. For example null versus undefined versus NaN - omg and I thought having to test (in Perl) with exists() instead of defined() was bad enough! So in terms of what should the host language be to encapsulate the child languages, javascript is definitely not a candidate, owing to the randomly contrasting decisions that were made about typelessness and values in its world (and the number of mobile app bugs I have seen created when data in new versions falls through the cracks in this system). The workaround (of multiplying up) to its having no 'use integer' pragma is particularly disgusting and unscalable and the lack of scoping just about bangs the last nail in its coffin.

On the other hand, arrays would be needed in Perl to represent XML sequences and I already had enough trouble having to maintain these for DHTML output from Perl (via sprintf) - one of the things that got me started with this. Python occurred to me as a more readable way to manage sequences, but was dismissed almost as rapidly when I realised the nesting depth is arbitrary and there is no syntax for dereferencing the nested structures (unlike in Perl and XML)

Looks like I am left with XML as the candidate host format in which to express the Perl, Javascript, HTML and CSS components of a web or mobile application. It has the added advantage of being able to plug in other server languages, like Java, PHP etc., although I may be tempted to compile that into binary XML before deployment. I still haven't given this mission the green light, though.

One world, one people

In reply to Epilogue re Maximising Language integration... by anonymized user 468275
in thread Maximising Language integration: Holy Grail or Dystopia? by anonymized user 468275

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