Re: [Gnu-arch-users] cygwin support for tla, thoughts

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

>>>>> "Tobias" == Tobias C Rittweiler <address@hidden> writes:

    >> Tom, your design sense is generally excellent; can you explain
    >> that design decision to us?

    Tobias> AFAIK one reason is, because it this way works better for
    Tobias> him and his emacs filemanager thingy. At least, he told me
    Tobias> so once, probably sarcastically.

It wasn't sarcasm.

This is good design given the infrastructure.  In Unix, it's easy to
do (split-string path "/").  With Tom's design, you do

(split-string (last (split-string path "/")) "--")

and now the program knows at what depth you are, simply by counting
the elements of the return value.  Similarly, for presentation to
humans, simply (last (split-string path "/")) tells a human exactly
where in the hierarchy you are.  The use of Lisp here is deliberate;
even if you never learned any Emacs Lisp, the algorithm is so
straightforward I bet you can tell what those expressions do.

With a .../$CAT/$BRN/$VER structure, on the other hand, the parsing
program needs to know a lot more about arch.  This means that
separately written tools will quickly start to constrain the
Arch-itect's options for redesign.  Helper programs get complex and
fault-prone; algorithms are abandoned in favor of heuristics.

monkey.el is just one example of such an application.

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