Re: transports directory

[Tom Samplonius <tom@uniserve.com>]

On Mon, 17 Jul 1995, Greg A. Woods wrote:

> Just a silly stupid example that doesn't even mention system services,
> but rather only inter-application compatabilty:  Suppose you build the
> Zmailer interpreter with sdbm (we want Zmailer to be portable), but
> someone else installs perl with the gdbm library.  Suddenly perl scripts
> external to Zmailer won't be able to operate with Zmailer db's.  Now
> yes, this is silly and easy to fix, but it illustrates what I believe to
> be a fundamental problem with perl:  The primitives available in the perl
> interpreter are too tightly wired to the language, and there's no
> standard definition of the language separate from the primitives.

  This is good point.  However, the current zmsh suffers from this too.  
Currently scripts need to specify the type of binary database to use 
(ndbm, gdbm, dbm).  I don't think there is any reason to support ndbm and 
gdbm at the same time. 

  What really should be done, is that when you build Zmailer, you should 
specify the dbm-style database of choice (whether nddbm, gdbm, or db), 
and then scripts should just use a general, common interface.  I would 
also like to see that hybrid idx/dat database type to be replaced by your 
dbm-style database of choice.

  Thankfully the current stuff for gdbm, ndbm, and db is also handled as 
extensions (they are not primitives), so it can easily be ripped out of perl.

Tom