From: craigberry@nospam.mac.com   
      
   On 12/5/25 8:41 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:   
      
   > VSI cannot start classic evolution process of adding new features   
   > to DCL over time.   
   >   
   > What to do?   
   > -----------   
      
   > What I see left is the "RATFOR approach" (in this century it should   
   > probbaly be called "transpiling approach", but I suspect more people   
   > here know about RATFOR than all the transpiling to JavaScript being   
   > done today). Pre-processing extended DCL to old DCL.   
      
      
   I don't see how transpilation could get you 64-bit integers, hashes,   
   regular expressions integrated into the language, or other things that   
   would be expected from a modern scripting language.  Even if user-   
   written lexicals were possible, you couldn't really use them to create   
   or manage very interesting data structures given that DCL symbol values   
   are limited to 1024 characters.   
      
   You are of course correct that adding features to DCL or reimplementing   
   it in a way that is both compatible but extensible would be very   
   difficult and have a low probability of success.   
      
   I don't think VSI is really big enough to invent and maintain an   
   entirely new language. They should probably leave DCL as-is and start   
   porting .NET and thus PowerShell.  As far as I know, all the relevant   
   bits are open source and MIT license, and PowerShell is intended to work   
   as both a CLI and a scripting language. It would be a big project, but   
   probably smaller than creating a new DCL implementation.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)