[Aldor-l] Problems with x86_64 binary

[Bill Hart]

Hi,

After spending about a year looking at computer languages trying to
find one suitable for the next stage of my project (www.flintlib.org),
I finally encountered Aldor.

Actually Aldor was not on any of the widely available lists of
programming languages, e.g. those on Wikipedia, or in the Tiobe index,
etc. Thus it was only by chance I happened upon it. I think I may have
vaguely encountered it in a paper many years ago.

I downloaded the x86_64 binary on my Linux box (Ubuntu). Unfortunately
the installer doesn't work. I took a look in the file and it appears
to have a script joined to a binary which is supposed to be a tgz
file.

When running the script, a license agreement pops up and I have to
scroll through it line by line, and if I press one too many keys it
dumps me to the command line. This happened a number of times and
became exceedingly frustrating. Then I had to type out accept. It gets
this far, but then simply complains.

It seems the options being passed to tail are invalid. Moreover, the
line count before the binary starts appears to be invalid. After
removing the header manually, the remainder does not appear to be a
valid tar archive. So I gave up trying to install it.

Then I went searching for documentation. I searched and search.
Eventually I found it via a link from elsewhere on the web, which took
me to a wiki page, where I found the documentation.

In the documentation it mentions an interpreter for Aldor, but I have
not been able to find this. Where is it available?

Anyhow, I downloaded the source and after some *hours* I managed to
figure out how to build it. It really has a complex build system.

I spent a few days reading the documentation from cover to cover and
wrote my first Aldor programs. I was impressed with both the language
(from a theoretical perspective) and with the speed of the compiler.
In some instances it actually performed better than my C compiler.

I was about ready to use it for my project, but then decided to
examine the license in more detail. I also had someone else look at it
for me, and they agree it seems to require that any "open source"
developer who contributes to Aldor, give all their code to aldor.org.
I looked up the license and discovered this is not a license
recognised by the OSI and is termed "semi-free" by the FSF.

Have you looked at the modified BSD license? It still allows you to
assert copyright, to sell Aldor, run a company based on it, sell
derivative versions, requires people to retain the copyright notice,
gives no warranty and I imagine allows you to do everything else you
currently do with it. However it would also be a fully free license
which would be essential for any Open Source developers to consider
contributing to the project (or to maintain their own version of
Aldor).

When I came to the Aldor list I see most of the recent posts have been
in relation to the license. I also see zero community around the
language. I think this is a huge shame. Yes I see the huge
intellectual contribution Aldor makes!

Even Microsoft know that a language simply has to be open sourced to
be successful these days. They just fully Open Sourced F#.

What worries me in using this license for my project is that if
anything happens to the current maintainers, or Aldor is purchased by
a company who wants to scuttle it, then my language of choice would
have zero support overnight. No further updates, and it would be in
legal limbo. There wouldn't be anything I could do about it. As new
architectures arrive on the scene my project would become more and
more obsolete. All my hard work down the drain. For this reason I
cannot possibly consider recommending to my developers that we use the
language. It simply has no future.

Would you consider doing something with the license to make it fully free?

By the way, are there any plans to support other backend targets
(solaris, itanium, ARM, GPU's)? Also, is it known to run on MAC OSX?
Are there any plans to add primitives to the language for parallel
(threaded) code? Apologies if I have overlooked any of this in the
extensive manual.

Regards,

Dr. William Hart