Re: transports directory

[Tom Samplonius <tom@uniserve.com>]

On Sun, 16 Jul 1995, Mark Moraes wrote:

> 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.

  Tcl is nice, and would be very easy to embed.  Lack of preparsing is 
annoying.

> 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.

  I'm no fan of Scheme.  There are just too many damn dialects, and too 
many damn parentheses :)

> 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.

  I don't see that much of a difference.  tclsh is 7.4 and perl is 
5.001m.  perl also has a lot of extensions that could be removed.

misery# size tclsh
text	data	bss	dec	hex
118784	8192	32	127008	1f020
misery# size /usr/local/bin/perl
text	data	bss	dec	hex
241664	36864	14376	292904	47828

> = 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?

  No.  2.2eX contains bug and portability fixes, mainly for Solaris.

> 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?! :-)

  Exactly.  Refer to archives of comp.lang.tcl and the "Don't use TCL" 
thread.

  guile is just another scheme-a-like, of which there are many: elk, scm, 
scheme48, mit-scheme, scheme->C, STk, ....


Tom