Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2002 19:35:26 +0100 (BST) From: Mark Valentine <mark@thuvia.demon.co.uk> To: "Brian F. Feldman" <green@freebsd.org> Cc: naddy@mips.inka.de (Christian Weisgerber), freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Scripting languages (was: Re: Package system flaws?) Message-ID: <200207231835.g6NIZQ7Y055643@dotar.thuvia.org> In-Reply-To: <200207231745.g6NHjfZ47049@green.bikeshed.org>
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> From: "Brian F. Feldman" <green@freebsd.org> > Date: Tue 23 Jul, 2002 > Subject: Re: Scripting languages (was: Re: Package system flaws?) > Mark Valentine <mark@thuvia.demon.co.uk> wrote: > > I think many of the issues regarding maintaining an arbitrary third party > > scripting environment in the base system would be mitigated by fairly minor > > enhancements to existing facilities. > > No. No, they wouldn't. Your reasoning didn't quite convince me. ;-) > I advise VERY strongly against trying to do things > with sh which it is bad at. Korn gets that very wrong and makes ksh do a > lot of nice things I'm not advocating growing /bin/sh into quite such a monster. Most of my scripting is still done in a _portable subset_ of Bourne shell. I use a more suitable language (whatever is available and has the desired feature set) for the minority of tasks which require a more powerful scripting language yet don't warrant being written in C. If I could use sh for that middle stuff, my life would be that bit more complete. So far all we've identified that's truely missing are better array/list handling and extensibility via dynamically loadable modules. > but couples with a syntax which is _BAD_ for a > general-purpose language. I don't consider it any worse than most others. What's more, it's *familiar* (yes, overdoing extensions would go against that advantage, so should be avoided). I value minimal syntactic verbosity in a scripting language, and the Bourne shell doesn't do too badly there (but stuff too much into it and you get to Perl). You didn't say why you considered it _BAD_. > There are _so_ many small, perfectly good > scripting languages that could be used instead, and are tremendously easier > to learn (much easier than learning how to do weird magic in sh). I already know how to do weird magic in sh, thanks, and most folks should know it to some extent (except those who latched onto a "newer" scripting language early on and simply can't survive unless their favourite tool is installed). > The solution probably isn't to maintain yet another scripting language in > the tree. It's also not to use a Bourne shell. Maybe it is acceptable to > write something totally new, I don't know. It shouldn't look anything like > sh, though. Attempts to maintain another scripting language failed twice already, and NIH doesn't sound like a solution either (or I'd try to sell you on the design of _my_ ideal scripting language ;-). /bin/sh has served us well over the years (at least after it grew functions), and it wouldn't take much for it to be useful for significant additional purposes. All in all, it's an issue of functionality rather than one of taste, though. Cheers, Mark. -- Mark Valentine, Thuvia Labs <mark@thuvia.co.uk> <http://www.thuvia.co.uk>; "Tigers will do ANYTHING for a tuna fish sandwich." Mark Valentine uses "We're kind of stupid that way." *munch* *munch* and endorses FreeBSD -- <http://www.calvinandhobbes.com>; <http://www.freebsd.org>; To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message
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