Re: [Gnu-arch-users] arch roadmap 1 (and "what's tom up to")

[Tom Lord]

    > From: "Pierce T.Wetter III" <address@hidden>

    > > No, but, hey, thanks for the insult.

    >   I could be pedantic about whether saying you were being
    > pedantic is the same thing as calling you a pedantic, but that
    > would be pedantic...

No insult intended, I take it.  Cool.


    >>> My point is that furth will be used for "rule files", not so
    >>> much for feature development. Which you confirmed.

    > > Please don't put words in my mouth.

    > Quote: "You seem to think I'm going to stop everything and immediately
    > completely rewrite arch in some strange language that I made
    > up on the spot.   That's not the plan.   Reacting against that
    > non-plan is really off topic."


"used for feature development" != "completely rewritten in"


    >   How did I put words in your mouth? 

By confusing "used for feature development" with "completely rewritten
in".

    > Anyways, I see why you might want a language in the rule/config
    > files for arch, but I don't see the need for furth.

In my view, a "need for a language" comes up against the problem of
"existing popular languages are unprincipled crap" and so Furth is a
language which isn't (or won't be).


    > When CMU was working on the Andrew email program it had a really 
    > minimal configuration mechanism that was almost freeform because it 
    > wasn't done yet so it was more or less "syntax free".

    >   Then they added a proper parser, which would reject badly formed files.

    >   Everyone complained, because the "syntax free" format was actually 
    > easier to use.

Yes, that's the kind of bind which, as responsible hackers, we'll
avoid getting into.

You might not know that when Information Technology Center at CMU was
working on the Andrew email program, towards the end of the lifetime
of the Andrew project, they added a turing complete extension language
to the email program (a Scheme dialect) --- alas, by that time, it was
far too late to deploy much.


    >   Anyways, what about TCL? I seem to remember the interpreter
    > being pretty minimal. There are a couple of JavaScript
    > interpreters out there as well.


Tcl _was_, once upon a time, tiny and nifty.  When beefing up the
mainline for it they failed to fork and save that core, unfortunately.

But nevermind that: Tcl utterly fails on all five of the Gems (which,
in some circles, aren't exotic esoterica but rather the basic bread
and butter of day-to-day hacking;  it's culture shock to some of us
that the gems need to be pointed out at all).

-t