Re: [Texmacs-dev] Getting rid of Scheme?

[Joris van der Hoeven]

> 1)  Expose necessary functions within TeXmacs to Python.  Then basically
> rewrite the progs directory in Python.  One can then use Python to customize
> the keyboard and the menus.  How much of a work does this sound to be?

Yes, that is feasable, but it requires several months of work.
However, I do not think that I want to switch to Python myself.
Scheme has the advantage of being even more customizable than Python.
On the other hand, I would be interested if people want to develop
ways to make the TeXmacs primitives available in other scripting
languages and vice versa. In other words, when starting the Python
plug-in, TeXmacs would export all scheme and C++ primitives to Python.

> 2)  Eventhough I like Python much better than Scheme, I still believe that for
> maintainability reasons a computer program should be written in one language.
> The reason being that not all C++ programmers know Python and not all Python
> programmers know C++.  The exact same is true for Scheme as well.  So while
> the syntax of Python IMHO is 1000% better than that of Scheme I would not
> like any scripting capability in my own version of TeXmacs.  So I would like
> to basically write a DLL that has all the functionaility that the 'progs'
> directory in the TeXmacs distribution contains.  This basically means writing
> the 'progs' directory in C++ and making it available as a DLL.  Customizing
> TeXmacs would then mean recompiling this DLL instead of messing around with
> the pathetic language know as Scheme.  I personally would recompile a C++ DLL
> over reading and modifying Scheme any time.

I don't consider Scheme to be a pathetic language.

> 3)  While going thru a short guile tutorial, I came to learn that Guile can
> emulate other languages.  i.e if you expose your application to Guile, the
> user can actually write their scripts in Python instead of Scheme.  Is this
> possible?

I would not use emulation, but rather exportation of primitives,
like I said above. This would make it possible for users to write
plug-ins in Python which may address any of the built-in Scheme functions.

> I have already put Scheme on my list of unlearnables---or lets put it that
> way---waste of time to learn in presence of more modern languages like
> Python.

Python is less modern than Scheme in several ways.