From: Kragen Sitaker (kragen@pobox.com)
Date: Thu Apr 27 2000 - 08:49:33 PDT
Jim Whitehead writes:
> This wins my "twisted hack of the day" award: an HTTP server implemented in
> Postscript.
That's sort of unfairly dismissive of Postscript, don't you think?
It's a fairly nice programming language (for those who like that sort
of thing), with some really nice geometric and text-formatting
primitives. Don Lancaster uses it to drive robots; even the blue book
contains a primitive text formatter. I've seen an IFS in PostScript;
there's a genetic-algorithm-based picture generator written in
PostScript at http://odur.let.rug.nl/~kleiweg/genart/; there's a fairly
full-featured text formatter in PostScript at
http://www.cs.adfa.oz.au/~gfreeman/.
It has the syntax of FORTH, the type system of Lisp (very roughly), and
Ghostscript has the speed of RScheme or Lua --- it's almost as fast as
FORTH, and is way faster than Perl.
I tend to think it's not a more popular programming language for the
following reasons:
- historically, most PostScript interpreters have been inside of printers
- FORTH's syntax and Lisp's type system are both very strange to Algol
programmers.
Not that *I've* ever written anything interesting in it.
-- <kragen@pobox.com> Kragen Sitaker <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/> The Internet stock bubble didn't burst on 1999-11-08. Hurrah! <URL:http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/bubble.html> The power didn't go out on 2000-01-01 either. :)
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