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[Peter Alcibiades]

Richmond, isn't it a simply huge task to write a decent cross compiler?  And
there's the problem of picking a language to do the cross compile into? 
What do you pick - Python, Ruby, Lua?  You notice even PythonCard didn't
ever seriously consider imports from HC.  And its not obviously in Rev's
interest.  And then, when you have it, how are you going to use it?  Like
all insurance, its going to sit there and wait for the day when an asteroid
strikes Edinburgh.  And that's when you'll find that oops, it doesn't quite
work as well as we had thought it would....

It would be nice if it existed as insurance, but its a bit hard to see it
happening.  Surely the answer, if one is really worried about getting locked
into Rev, is to move to something one is not worried about getting locked
into?  Or is the motivation quite different?  

In the Hypercard days, it was to run it on Windows.  It was visible all
along that getting locked not only into a programming language and an OS but
also hardware from one particular vendor was a bit of a risky bet.  But Rev
is cross platform and on any old hardware, so its much safer, your only risk
is a similar risk to any other language.  After all, what happens if you
picked Python, and the Pythonistas all one day move en masse to Ruby or
whatever?

Peter



Richmond Mathewson wrote:
> 
> 
> I wondered whether a set of stacks that could convert
> RR stacks into 'compilables' for other computing
> languages might be useful. 
> 
> 

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