Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Tla spork

[Tom Lord]

    > From: Matthew Dempsky <address@hidden>

    > Tom Lord <address@hidden> writes:

    > > My thinking has been that we should probably start consistently using
    > > s-exp based syntaxes and making sure that they pun as something that
    > > could be a macro.   That way, among other wins, we have less worry
    > > about extending the syntaxes in the future.

    > I wouldn't mind that at all except that it means first we'll need a
    > s-exp parser for tla to use.

Well, the s-exp data structure code in the xl library is pretty
small.  The (now bitrotted) reader is small.

Really, at this stage --- we're just amping libawk a little bit.  And
that's fine.


    > >   I think that, therefore, we'll want "tla/libawk"
    > > to be a lot more serious --- basically to be just the data-structure
    > > foo from xl plus relational operators on top of that.

    > So I should first extend libawk with s-exp foo?  Any recommendations
    > on API?  (I'll take another look at xl's reader stuff.)

Ignore the existing libawk code (unless, for example, you want a
template for, say, the join algorithm).

Close to what's in libawk is what we want --- just s-exp based.
That's a good fulcrum from which we can move the world.

It's also an extremely gentle introduction in the sense that if all of
our fancy plans come to naught, we will have done very little (if any)
damage and maybe even some good.  At this stage, the s-exp thing is
just a mild eccentricity that might be going somewhere interesting ---
not an overcommitment to the dubious ideas of any one developer.


correctness preserving and enhancing transformations-ally,
-t