I must bring again the concept of granularity. You are talking about ortogonality of big components that you can treat as black box objects that you access thru methods. Signatures allow to distinguish methods by the same name.

But if you go back to the small building block of a language the black box approach does not work. The shellish approach used by (old Bourne shells, tcl) is to treat the langage as an empty shell that provide little more than flow control. The cost is the you must fork process. Also there is the problem of multiple level of interpration agravated by the abscence of powerful quoting mechanisms like qq||.

Language for compiled program also delegates to black box libraries. But a "real" language like perl tries to integrate in the syntax common patterns like the use of hash. The problem is to find enough "dimensions" in the syntax to pack enough of this patterns in a readable way.

-- stefp -- check out TeXmacs wiki

In reply to Re: Re: (OT) On Orthogonality by stefp
in thread (OT) On Orthogonality by demerphq

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