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From: bruce@liverpool.ac.uk
Subject: Re: GNU Extension Language Plans
In-Reply-To: peter@nmti.com's message of Sat, 22 Oct 1994 00:00:34 GMT
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>>>>> "Peter" == Peter da Silva <peter@nmti.com> writes:

> OK, here's the scenario: I want to maintain a config file
> (~/browse.cf, say) that is generated by the application but the user
> shuld have the ability to edit. It needs to be in a language easy to
> automatically generate, easy to reload, easy for external programs
> to maintain, and easy for the naive user to modify.

I see the problem: it's easy to imagine rush to scheme converters and
similar beasts, but producing a scheme to rush converter that produces
anything useful is going to be non-trivial if not impossible.  For
typical config files, that's not such a problem: I don't see it as
unreasonable to expect people to be able to cope with scheme/lisp
syntax for very simple things (and anyway, your application should
provide a decent way of changing the configuration).

For writing extensions it's slightly more irritating.  If I'm used to
python, and I want to fiddle with a newsreader written in rush, then
I'm going to be a bit stuck.  I can write extra commands and things
(since everything gets compiled to scheme anyway), so it's not so bad,
but nevertheless it's less than ideal.

> Under any such scheme as this, the language that it all ends up
> being in is going to be Scheme. The translators are just not going
> to be used, long term.

I don't think this is necessarily true, but you may be right.

> This is not necessarily a bad thing. Just something to keep in mind.

Quite so.  Just in case, we need to make sure that the scheme
extention that's underneath is decent enough to be used directly.
-- 
Bruce                   Institute of Advanced Scientific Computation
bruce@liverpool.ac.uk   University of Liverpool

