In no particular order:
  • interactive environment (cf Lisp, Octave). Emacs integration is also nice. I've tried hacking this up for Perl, but it's not easy, since Perl's introspection (e.g. B::Xref) is still a bit primitive.
  • closures.
  • either macros or eval
  • OS interface
  • convenient C interface. While most code does not need to be optimized, many high-level languages make it somewhere between difficult and impossible to optimize that 5-10% that really needs it.

    In reply to Re: Indispensible language features by educated_foo
    in thread Indispensible language features by FoxtrotUniform

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