Solar wrote:
Don't laugh too loud, SOLARSYSTEM is my LAN's ESSID and workgroup. My nick is "solar", and my wife is nicked "luna".
...but, shouldn't that then be "Sol", not "Solar" ?
That's... erm... historical. SOL was my three-letter-highscore-nick back in the 80ies. (I was like, 12 or so at the time.) That doesn't pronounce too well, and few people knew that Sol <-> our sun. So, when highscore lists allowed for more than SOL, I wrote "Solar". I stuck to that ever since, on the university cluster, my first e-mail address, in various forums... only on IRC and Sourceforge I'm "DevSolar", because someone else came first.
Every good solution is obvious once you've found it.
Solar wrote:
That doesn't sound very performance-critical to me. REBOL claims to be just the thing for that, and a friend of mine (DevL, he is sometimes even around on this forum) found it to be pretty nice - but expensive.
Actually, Sassenrath et al recently release REBOL/View 1.3 which is a bit nicer license-wise. As for REBOL it was excellent for cross-platform development although it nowadays are a bit lacking in that respect. Still, it might be worth checking out if you're mostly into Windows and Linux. A Mac OS X port should come out soon, but then again 1.3 was suppossed to be out one and a half years ago...
Try looking into Eiffel or its more type-safe derivative Sather. I should point out that I have not personally programmed with either, though what I've read about them made them sound very promising (language-wise) for anyone interested in OO languages (try looking for "smarteiffel" or "smalleiffel" or whatever it's called nowadays for a free implementation). The language is highly respected among OO people, has a decent amount of libraries in the "smarteiffel"/"smalleiffel" implementation, should be reasonably efficient (code is compiled down to C code there, IIRC), and has (or is supposed to have) automatic memory management and an (almost) state-of-the-art type system.
Other than that, I have to agree with most of School-R-LEA-1's rant about PL, modulo the caveat that Java and C# at least avoid pointer arithmetic and manual memory management and try to approximate a coherent type system.
...too bad "Solaris" is already taken or you'd have a near-perfect OS name 
