Assignment versus binding

[Chris Angelico]

On Thu, Oct 6, 2016 at 6:35 AM, BartC <bc at freeuk.com> wrote:
> This is exactly why I persist with my own language implementations. My
> current one is only 1/5000th the size but standard libraries are included!)

Yes, it has all the standard library that *you* expect. Does it have
what some random person on the internet will expect? Here are a few
examples from the standard library of Python:

* Unicode character names and categories
* Date/time manipulation
* Arbitrary-precision rationals
* Statistical functions
* zlib (zip/gzip) compression and decompression
* sqlite3 databasing
* BSD sockets
* Various internet protocols  (HTTP, FTP, SMTP, IMAP)

And that's not even counting the stuff that, if it were proposed
today, would probably be pushed to PyPI. Standard libraries tend to be
fairly large because they're catering to a lot of people's needs. Mind
you, two gig is still a lot, I'm not denying that; but you're saying
that yours is half a meg, and I doubt that a full-featured language of
today can exist inside a floppy disk.

(Also, does your implementation compile directly to machine code, or
does it depend on something else? It's easy to make something small if
it depends on another compiler/interpreter.)

ChrisA