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From : Leo V. Mironoff 2:5020/293 08 Apr 00 16:18:18
Subj : 4hf
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Area : .4HF
From : Dmitry Melamud (2:467/28.40), Sun Apr 02 2000 01:36
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=============================== * Forward * =================================
* Area : hacknet.humor
* Name : David Livingstone, 33:1/2.40 -> All (02 Apr 00 03:29)
* Subj : GNU VBasic
Hi, All!
Свежая новость от freshmeat.net:
=== Режь ===
Richard Stallman, leader of the Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project,
today announced the first developers release of GNU Visual Basic. Hit the
"details" link for the complete announcement.
"It's been nagging at me for years," Stallman told freshmeat news correspondent
Jeff Covey, "Why do I keep clinging to lisp? Lisp of all things? I mean, who
even writes in lisp any more? Look at all that lisp code the AI community
churned out for years and years -- did it get us closer to a machine that's any
smarter than a well-trained bag of dirt? It's just time to move on."
Last year, Stallman started looking around at the alternatives. "We've
abandoned Scheme, and will slowly be removing Guile from all our projects over
the course of this summer. We had to find an extension language to replace it.
I looked at Perl, Python, Eiffel, LOGO... even at TCL."
"Then one day I was in a doctor's office and I saw the receptionist running all
these neat macros in her word processor. I investigated further, and came to
realize that this was exactly what I was looking for -- a language already in
widespread use that would come with its own user base. We just had to clone it,
and there would be a whole community right there ready to use it. I started
work on it that night, and it's consumed most of my time in between speaking
engagements ever since."
The first large project which will adopt GNU/VB will be one of Stallman's most
famous works, the GNU/EMACS editor.
"Preliminary work is complete on our elisp-to-GNU/VBscript converter," Stallman
said. "Once all the .el files in the EMACS distribution have been converted to
.gvb files and tested, the next release of GNU/EMACS will be extensible only in
GNU/VBscript. I realize this will cause some preliminary inconvenience to our
users, but they'll have to accept that they can't stand in the way of
progress."
While Linus Torvalds has declined to comment at this time on the question of
whether the Linux kernel will be rewritten in GNU/VB, other GNU developers have
been enthusiastic in their support of Stallman's decision. GNOME project leader
Miguel de Icaza declared this "the groundwork for a monumental leap forward for
the GNU desktop". Reached by IRC, he said, "We've been coordinating with the
GNU/VB team for months to create the GNU/VB bindings for GTK+, and are very
excited about the features it will allow us to incorporate into our work. Take
AbiWord, for instance. In the next release, whenever you open a Word document,
any VBscript macros found in it will be automatically executed. You can imagine
how powerful this will be in combination with the GNOME address book and the
mail clients. This compatibility with the Windows desktop will give us an edge
that we think will help us to finally overtake that other desktop environment."
"Look, will people stop DCCing me the DeCSS code? I'm trying to talk here," he
concluded.
As a homage to the authors of Microsoft Visual Basic, Stallman has decided to
depart from his usual practice of releasing software under the GNU General
Public License; the GNU/VB compiler (gvbc), the GNU/VBscript interpreter (gvb),
and the GNU Foundation Classes will be available in binary format only, and
will not be available for download from the Internet.
"More and more, I go into stores like CompUSA and Best Buy, and I see shelves
filled with 'Linux This' and 'Linux That'," Stallman said. "Why aren't we
getting any of that action? Distributing GNU/VB strictly as shrinkwrapped
software will not only lend an air of legitimacy that software can't have when
it's free, it will get the GNU brand name out there to the general public. It
may even get us to my ultimate dream -- seeing a box with 'GNU' on it on the
shelves at Walmart."
The GNU Project welcomes any developers who wish to participate in beta testing
the upcoming builds; anyone interested should contact gnu@gnu.org to request a
copy of the Non-Disclosure Agreement.
=== Режь ===
Для тех, кто в танке: новость датирована 1 апреля ;)
P.S. Имхо это лучший первоапрельский розыгрыш в этом году. Я почти купился ;)
--< DvsL >--
-+- GoldED/LNX 3.0.0
+ Origin: Университет развивает все способности, включая глупость (33:1/2.40)
--- lvm#aha.ru * Origin: Просьба отправлять на фильтрацию с сабджем 4hf. Спасибо (2:5020/293)
