Date: Thu, 19 Aug 2010 01:03:42 +1000 From: Andrew Milton <akm@theinternet.com.au> To: Luigi Rizzo <rizzo@iet.unipi.it> Cc: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Interpreted language(s) in the base Message-ID: <20100818150342.GA402@camelot.theinternet.com.au> In-Reply-To: <20100818142852.GA80221@onelab2.iet.unipi.it> References: <4C6505A4.9060203@FreeBSD.org> <4C650B75.3020800@FreeBSD.org> <4C651192.9020403@FreeBSD.org> <i477eo$i4d$1@dough.gmane.org> <4C673898.2080609@FreeBSD.org> <AANLkTim_prShRiHkLnFbhek9%2Beaa-KaJ5oZtNo%2BLd0K1@mail.gmail.com> <alpine.BSF.2.00.1008152240370.66595@qbhto.arg> <20100818134341.GA88861@johnny.reilly.home> <20100818142852.GA80221@onelab2.iet.unipi.it>
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+-------[ Luigi Rizzo ]---------------------- | On Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 11:43:41PM +1000, Andrew Reilly wrote: | > On Sun, Aug 15, 2010 at 11:15:55PM -0700, Doug Barton wrote: | > > got any other suggestions? | > | > This is very much a "sorry I asked" question, but is none-the | > less quite a good one, given the size of the hole to be plugged. | > | > I think that a reasonable answer for this sort of thing might be | > one of the dynamic languages that compiles to C, like (perhaps) | > one of the schemes (chicken, gambit-C, bigloo, etc). You get | > the benefit of flexibility and dynamism with good regexp and | > data structure ability, good performance, and only requiring the | > build tools available in the base system, as long as you don't | > want to be the developer: just ship the C code (as well as the | > source, of course). | | slightly off topic but I disagree on the latter part. | | The whole point of having source code is to be able to make | modifications, small or large, private or ones to be contributed | back. As a teacher, i am very concerned about the ease-of-use for | non-developer types: it is important to make it easy for people to | experiments, as this is one of the ways people learn things. I have to agree with Luigi. You have to work out your target audience, and that should be your first constraint to choosing the language. If the language has a syntax structure that's going to be hard to parse by non-developers at first glance (like forth or perl), then you're really limiting the userbase. C is scriptable and embeddable these days from a variety of projects, but, I wouldn't recommend that either necessarily (since C doesn't have dynamic typing), even if we could get 100% architecture coverage. -- Andrew Milton akm@theinternet.com.au
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