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rtaycher

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Java/C# are different in that they compile to a bytecode which is like vm assembly its also not meant as a high level programming language(note that this isn't always compiled to assembly at the end as it can be interpreted, standard java for instance does both jit and interprets for best results).

"Converting programming languages really doesn't serve any purpose whatsoever" Compilers are useful. This probably won't reach production quality but that doesn't mean it couldn't with the right effort, see hip-hop or one of those x-> javascript compilers.

Something that legally prohibits this falls outside the definition of open source. Dual licensing with part of it not available as open source can fulfill your need although many including me somewhat dislike that and consider that against the spirit of open source. The GPL prevents people from modifying/distributing modified source without releasing the source and is highly disliked by a number of companies who would have nothing to do with it. They can still use it without distributing it like on a server without releasing changes as open source.

reference counting is slower* then other forms of gc. My guess why its fairly fast in c++ has a lot to do whith how much you can avoid it by allocating things on the stack(of course you can do escape anaylsis but most gc'd languages don't have explicit stack allocation of non basic types)

*with a lot of collaries

The Lisp Curse 15 years ago

I believe smalltalk block are BlockClosure objects that can be passed around like any other parameter.

Yes but some of the examples of obj-c I've seen look ridiculously wordy compared with the smalltalk equivalents (even if you ignore op overloading). (setObject: forKey:) vs (at: put:). for ex.

My impression was that Woz developed apple 1(which gave apple some funds) by himself(with jobs only encouraging/pushing) and developed a very large of the apple II(which made apple a multi million dollar company) and then not much else. which was one of the first personal computers and was transformational(helping introduce personal computers into the world including a wide variety of clones. Jobs was the team head who designed the first mac(which was transformational in its own way-one of the first gui ) personal computers). At least according to foklore.org a decent number of the brilliant people working for apple on the mac and other projects were there in a significant part because they fell in love with woz's work.

Skype 5 for Mac 15 years ago

Having downloaded it I can't seem to find a trace of any pascal but plenty of nib files.