Extensible Programming for the 21st Century

ABSTRACT

Is an open, more flexible programming environment just around the corner?
In his keynote address at OOPSLA '98 (Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications), Sun Microsystems Fellow Guy L. Steele Jr. said, "From now on, a main goal in designing a language should be to plan for growth." Functions, user-defined types, operator overloading, and generics (such as C++ templates) are no longer enough: tomorrow's languages must allow programmers to add entirely new kinds of information to programs, and control how it is processed.

REFERENCES

• 1: Ladd, S. R. 2003. An evolutionary analysis of GNU C optimizations; see http://www.coyotegulch.com/.
• 2: SUIF: see http://suif.stanford.edu/.
• 3: Bachrach, J., and K. Playford. 2001. The Java Syntactic Extender; see http://www.ai.mit.edu/~jrb/jse/jse.pdf.
• 4: XDoclet: see http://xdoclet.sourceforge.net/.
• 5: Jack Herrington, Code Generation in Action, Manning Publications Co., Greenwich, CT, 2003
• 6: Kathleen Dollard, Code Generation in Microsoft .Net, APress, 2004
• 7: Krzysztof Czarnecki , Ulrich W. Eisenecker , Robert Glück , David Vandevoorde , Todd L. Veldhuizen, Generative Programming and Active Libraries, Selected Papers from the International Seminar on Generic Programming, p.25-39, April 27-May 01, 1998
• 8: Andrew Patzer, JSP examples and best practices, Apress, Berkely, CA, 2002
• 9: See reference 6 (Dollard) for a discussion of the pros and cons of using Microsoft .NET's CodeDom for code generation.
• 10: Donald E. Knuth, Literate programming, Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford, CA, 1992
• 11: See CONS (http://www.dsmit.com/cons/) and SCons (http://www.scons.org/) for examples of code-oriented build tools. Interestingly, the creator of Ant, James Duncan Davidson, has written: "If I knew then what I know now, I would have tried using a real scripting language, such as JavaScript via the Rhino component or Python via JPython, with bindings to Java objects which implemented the functionality expressed in today's tasks. Then, there would be a first-class way to express logic and we wouldn't be stuck with XML as a format that is too bulky for the way that people really want to use the tool." http://x180.net/Articles/Java/AntAndXML.html.
• 12: Mozart: see http://mozart-dev.sourceforge.net/; SuperX++: see http://xplusplus.sourceforge.net/; o:XML: see http://www.o-xml.org.
• 13: ECMA-357: ECMAScript for XML: see http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-357.htm.
• 14: Meijer, E. Schulte, W., and G. Bierman. Programming with circles, triangles, and rectangles; see http://www.research.microsoft.com/~emeijer/Papers/XML2003/xml2003.html.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
      D.3.2 Language Classifications
          Subjects: Extensible languages

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.1 PROGRAMMING TECHNIQUES
      D.1.0 General
  D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
      D.3.1 Formal Definitions and Theory
          Subjects: Syntax

General Terms:
Algorithms, Languages, Performance