Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: Auto-registration

[Tom Lord]

    > From: Miles Bader <address@hidden>

    > On Fri, Feb 06, 2004 at 10:28:36AM -0500, Aaron Bentley wrote:
    > > Well, I do have a philosophical objection.  It's not a strong one, but
    > > here it is: tla is a C program, which makes it very performant for some
    > > kinds of operations.  But it's not a particularly fast language to write
    > > in.  

    > That might be a good objection in many cases, but not in this one.  
Adding it
    > to the C code would be be absurdly simple.

    > `Let's not bloat tla' is a soothing cry, but I think that this particular
    > change would have both very high usefulness-to-effort _and_
    > usefulness-to-bloat ratios.

There's two other considerations, too:

1) The various library modules that tla code uses are designed to make
   the internals closer to a scripting language than to classic C
   programming.   The barrier between what should and shouldn't be in
   C is shifted at least a little bit.


2) This particular change is something that can be done entirely
   within the cmd-*.c files.

   If it required pervasive changes in the core or even just hairing
   up some core routines I'd be against it for the same reason as
   Aaron.

   But I decided a while ago that the best way to make the UI really
   nice in the long run is to let in a lot of these kinds of
   convenience tweaks.  My thinking is that what makes a complex UI
   nice in the long run is if it's _more_or_less_ regular and minimal
   -- but also has a bunch nuanced special cases and add-on tweaks the
   same way that a nicely designed college campus is likely to have an
   attractive layout of official sidewalks but also a few
   well-packed-down dirt paths across the lawn where, over the years,
   everyone has agreed that the sidewalk plan wasn't quite right or
   wasn't quite sufficient.

-t