On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 9:38 PM, Arthur A. Gleckler <aag@speechcode.com> wrote:

>  The other (or at least another) is the embedded-systems language;
>  simplicity, clarity, and expressiveness are important, but the
>  implementation needs to be fast and small (possibly skipping parts
>  of the numeric tower for the sake of being small) and the "minimal"
>  I/O requirement is byte-oriented.  Reading/Writing characters is
>  secondary and may be supplied by a library implemented in terms of
>  bytes.

An arbitrarily embeddable language cannot have any I/O API
requirements. ECMAScript, for example, doesn't have any I/O. It is up
to the host program, into which the language is embedded, to add host
objects which enable an I/O API appropriate to the embedding.

Peter