VB and 4th?

[jc at trillian.mit.edu]

--------

	 BTW, I use bash scripts a LOT in my work, and quite
	 productively, but please, let's not reopen that my-approach-
	 to-scripting-is-better-than-yours can'o'worms since it's
	 already been firmly established that Visual Basic is the
	 hands-down, undisputed winner, with Forth being a close
	 second and all other contenders left in the dust...  ;->

No; let's reopen it. ;-) To be more specific, where can we get VB and
4th for linux, the various BSD clones, Solaris, and so on?

One of the advantages of "pure" Bourne shell scripts, perl, tcl,  and
maybe  csh  and  ksh  is  their  widespread availability, at least on
Unix-like systems.  So if you want to write scripts  that  you'll  be
able  to  use  on  the  next machine you're working on, these are all
reasonable scripting languages.  VB and 4th seem to be not as  widely
available, which decreases their value a lot.

Anyway,  if  you're interested in performance, you probably shouldn't
be using any "scripting" language.  If performance is first  on  your
list,  you  should  probably  be  using  C  or assembly language.  If
something else is first (speed of implementation, portability),  then
C  and  assembly  aren't  contenders, but perl and tcl and python are
real good candidates.  It's not clear to me where VB  and  4th  rank,
though, and a major part of this question is availability.

(4th is a fun language.  I've  used  and  implemented  it,  and  keep
thinking that it's sorely neglected by the industry. For that matter,
I keep coming across situations where I really wish I had prolog  and
APL available for all the machines I'm working on.)

(And where do java and javascript fit into all this?)

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