Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!rochester!udel!news.mathworks.com!hookup!swrinde!howland.reston.ans.net!ix.netcom.com!netcom.com!bakul
From: bakul@netcom.com (Bakul Shah)
Subject: Re: Removing READ
Message-ID: <bakulD4H8yp.EL8@netcom.com>
Organization: NETCOM On-line Communication Services (408 261-4700 guest)
References: <hbaker-2202951004460001@192.0.2.1> <23Feb1995.012935.Alan@LCS.MIT.EDU>
Date: Thu, 23 Feb 1995 23:52:00 GMT
Lines: 45
Sender: bakul@netcom14.netcom.com

>   From: Henry Baker <hbaker@netcom.com>
>   ...  The world would be dramatically improved if nearly
>   _all_ programs parsed s-expressions for '.xxxrc' programs instead of
>   re-inventing the parsing/language wheel for every single init file.

Alan@lcs.mit.EDU (Alan Bawden) writes:
>What!!!  You speak heresy!  Unix weenies take great pride in remembering
>all the quirks of all those little languages.  You probably think it would
>be good if they all used the same commenting convention, or used the same
>mechanism for continuation lines, or for quoting a newline, or for
>specifying a string value that starts with a space.  If they all had the
>same syntax then I could write an Emacs mode that knew how to edit them
>all.  That would be terrible!  Heck, if they had the same syntax, people
>might even be tempted to put all that information in -one- file.  What a
>disaster!

>What a bogus idea.  You Scheme losers will never learn.  All that
>convenience might -hurt- someone.

People have been inventing new little languages for all sorts of
purposes all  the time; ``Unix weenies'' aren't the only ones or
even the first.  Heck, some people even use Lisp to invent new
languages -- can you imagine, there are some heretics who want to
use infix notation for doing symbolic math!

While use of a single language for rc, initialization or
configuration files may simplify things (and I doubt it), it is
just not going to happen.  Why would one want rc like files for
sh, TeX, Ghostscript, X window programs, vi, ftp, kermit, MH,
Mail, nn, etc. etc. written in Scheme?  It makes much more sense
for these files to be in the `native' language the corresponding
program is designed to interpret.  And one can think of almost
every program as an interpeter of some language (however
incomplete or incoherent).

I bet even people who are primarily into a Scheme/Lisp
monoculture use a number of different languages.  PostScript,
TeX, regular expression language ala ed, filename wild cards,
shell languages, emacs or vi, etc.

May be your beef is that you are forced to use languages other
than Scheme; that there is no Scheme equivalent of PostScript,
Tex etc.  If so, that is a separate discussion.

Bakul Shah <bakul@netcom.com>
