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Date:      Sun, 20 Aug 1995 22:25:01 -0700
From:      "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>
To:        Peter da Silva <peter@bonkers.taronga.com>
Cc:        wosch@cs.tu-berlin.de, hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Any reason we can't enable the bus mouse by default? 
Message-ID:  <8036.808982701@time.cdrom.com>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 20 Aug 1995 21:54:57 CDT." <199508210254.VAA28320@bonkers.taronga.com> 

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> I ported the bmaked NetBSD version to FreeBSD. It could go in bindist
> tomorrow. That's a silly objection.

And maybe someday it will..  For now, a couple of *technical* points:

1. TCL is a fine language for what it does and even the most rank
   beginner will see after reading a couple of pages of docs that
   it does things that cannot be done easily in PERL.  Yes, it is
   possible to interface additional libraries to PERL but nowhere
   nearly as easily as one can with TCL and no big surprise there -
   extending applications is what TCL was designed for!  Fortunately
   for PERL fans, there are many things that one can do with PERL that
   aren't easy with TCL and if we didn't feel it to be of fundamental
   use then you wouldn't see PERL being the standard part of FreeBSD
   it is today.

2. I also believe that TCL's time to join FreeBSD is not far off, and
   really the only reason I've been holding off on importing Peter's
   bmaked sources (which he takes special pains to point me at about
   every 2 months! :-) is because I've known that a major new release
   of TCL was in the works and I didn't want to make two import operations
   out of it.  Now that tcl 7.4 is out, perhaps someone will bmake it.

Why do I want to see tcl as part of the tree?  Well, because I feel
that as a scripting language it simply has no peer (and I've used it
in LARGE projects as a consultant where I either delivered the goods
on time or didn't get paid) and we could all do well to standardise on
it in a number of applications where we're using a hodge-podge of
dissimilar "scripting languages" all rolled from scratch.  TCL is a
fine standard for describing behaviors external to a monolithic
application and I think we should use it.  There are going to be some
fine things coming out of Sun on this front, in fact, and I myself can
hardly wait to see them.

If Ctk didn't represent such an inferior curses interface today, I'd
even use it for the install (hint to the Ctk dudes: Tk was the wrong
standard to track - it's waaaaay too X-centric!  Please start over
with an approach that papers over the details of both rather than
trying to shove a size 6 foot into a size 12 shoe!).

					Jordan



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