Date: Mon, 16 Jun 1997 19:12:13 +0930 (CST) From: Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au> To: joelh@gnu.ai.mit.edu Cc: msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au, devnull@gnu.ai.mit.edu, molter@logic.it, adrian@obiwan.psinet.net.au, vas@vas.tomsk.su, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: To UNIX or not to UNIX ;-). Was: PPP problems. Message-ID: <199706160942.TAA11418@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> In-Reply-To: <199706160552.BAA16911@ethanol.gnu.ai.mit.edu> from Joel Ray Holveck at "Jun 16, 97 01:52:34 am"
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Joel Ray Holveck stands accused of saying: > >Bloody hard, bucko boy. There isn't enough meta-information > >associated with them to derive everything you need to know > >automagically, so you have to embed this information somewhere higher > >up the chain. This becomes unfun very fast, as as soon as the file > >format/usage changes your tools suffer from version skew. > > Most of the stuff is fairly static. When was the last time that the > resolv.conf format changed? Have a look at NetBSD. Then consider the sysconfig/rc.conf changeover. Then consider that if we want this tool to be anything like easy to support, it has to be flexible. > As for the stuff started in /etc/rc, I'm going to go out on a limb > here and assume that if we can get keep things coordinated enough to > have a sane configuration file, then we can keep a fairly simple > structure graph for it together. That's why I was thinking of using > Lisp for this; it's very easy to organize dynamic graphs and whatnot. Once you get over language fetishism, what you end up deciding you want is a language that lets you write at about the same rate you think, and in a similar fashion. Most reasonably advanced languages will let you do this. I could maintain that Tcl is ideal for the implementation I'm using, because I can keep the entire object structure (node names, list of methods and implementation functions) in a single array, and use variable substitution to construct the indices. You could probably do this a hundred different ways, depending on the language in question. Each would work. -- ]] Mike Smith, Software Engineer msmith@gsoft.com.au [[ ]] Genesis Software genesis@gsoft.com.au [[ ]] High-speed data acquisition and (GSM mobile) 0411-222-496 [[ ]] realtime instrument control. (ph) +61-8-8267-3493 [[ ]] Unix hardware collector. "Where are your PEZ?" The Tick [[
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