Re: transports directory

[Mark Moraes <Mark-Moraes@deshaw.com>]

Oh joy, a language war.

I generally agree with Scott Schwartz's caution about gratuitous change.
That said, I feel obliged to also point out that variants of those comments
were used to tell Rayan that he shouldn't write zmailer, why not just fix
sendmail :-) Or use upas.  Change is the price of progress, no?

I'm all in favor of moving from sh+ to something else, but since the entire
config would have to be re-written, that's a bunch of work.  If it were my
decision, I'd use Tcl since it's really easy to embed, but I think the
person who does the work gets to decide.  I'm a big fan of Tcl, but be
warned -- it can be slow because it isn't pre-parsed.  I've tried a few
experiments in improving Tcl performance, but haven't had enough time to
make it work properly.

Tom, if you do consider Scheme, take a look at SIOD. (Ask George J.
Carrette <gjc@mitech.com> for the latest version) It's probably the most
embeddable of the freely available Lisps, and pretty small.  Historical
note: Rayan once said that he would have rather used a Lisp variant except
for the fact that most sysadmins feel comfortable with sh but not with
Lisp.

Perl generally makes me feel ill; maybe one day it'll simplify enough that
this won't be a problem.  It's also, um, large.

= js2 ; size ~/src/siod/siod
text    data    bss     dec     hex
57344   8192    0       65536   10000
= js2 ; size /usr/local/tcl/bin/tclsh
text    data    bss     dec     hex
212992  32768   0       245760  3c000
= js2 ; size /usr/local/bin/perl
text    data    bss     dec     hex
540672  65536   0       606208  94000

Do the 2.2eX versions have proper 8-bit support?  MIME?

Greg Woods wrote:
 > Even the GNU folks are considering it as *the* standard extension
 > language for their tools.

This is an argument in favor of something?! :-)

	Mark.

--
 > Language designers love to argue about why this language or that language
 > *must* be better or worse a priori, but none of these arguments really
 > matter a lot.  Ultimately all language issues get settled when users vote
 > with their feet.  If Tcl makes people more productive then they will use
 > it;  when some other language comes along that is better (or if it is
 > here already), then people will switch to that language.  This is The
 > Law, and it is good.  The Law says to me that Scheme (or any other Lisp
 > dialect) is probably not the "right" language:  too many people have
 > voted with their feet over the last 30 years.  I encourage all Tcl
 > dis-believers to produce the "right" language(s), make them publically
 > available, and let them be judged according to The Law.
 > 	John Ousterhout.