> I've been following the recent discussion with interest here! It seems to
> me what may be critical to the success of safe-tcl is going to be the
> "killer app" rather than the language wars. Ultimately people use what
> works and what fills the bill at the moment (witness DOS). Maybe I've
> missed it, but I've hardly seen any safe-tcl applications at all. How
> about a listserve or majordomo based on safe-tcl as a possibly something
> people might use right away. It could also include some groupware sorts
> of things like voting, easy to use community archives and such.
I'm new to this discussion but it seems that you should take a look at
Java (http://java.sun.com/). It has all the features of Safe-Tcl, it is
secure, the performance is better, and it is freely available.
> Also, I didn't see any mention of Telescript in relation to ALF. I know
> it's propriertary and so far bundled with MagicCap, but from what I know
> it has a lot of features that safe-tcl doesn't have. For example, the
> meet and go operations and the directory services all that allow agents to
> know where to go and do things. It seems these can either be part of ALF
> in which case safe-tcl has a ways to go, or they have to be layered on top
> of ALF in another standard. They seem important to agent-based products
> to me.
Isn't TeleScript like Tcl but with postfix notation? Isn't TeleScript a
propriatery language?
> Last, the Netscape-Adobe deal that puts an Acrobat viewer in the Netscape
> browser piqued my interest. PostScript is a full language that could do
> agent stuff. Anyone think this is on Adobe's agenda? They could have
> software to run "PostScript Agents" on many peoples desk in a matter of
> months!
I believe that Acrobat only supports PDS, but I may be wrong. PDS is
not a full PostScript language implementation. It only supports the
graphics primitives. For a language to be useful in a WWW browser you
need much more that a "full" language. You need a complete
infrastructure for embedding, security, internet libraries etc.
PostScript is not appropriate for that.
Have fun,
Arthur van Hoff (avh@eng.sun.com)
http://java.sun.com/people/avh/
Sun Microsystems Inc, M/S UPAL02-301,
100 Hamilton Avenue, Palo Alto CA 94301, USA
Tel: +1 415 473 7242, Fax: +1 415 473 7104