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Re: [Gnu-arch-users] arch roadmap 1 (and "what's tom up to")
From: |
Tom Lord |
Subject: |
Re: [Gnu-arch-users] arch roadmap 1 (and "what's tom up to") |
Date: |
Wed, 30 Jun 2004 11:51:19 -0700 (PDT) |
> From: William Dode <address@hidden>
> Tom Lord <address@hidden> writes:
> > William Dode:
> > Could you explain briefly why the others langages doesn't fit ?
> > specialy lua wich is an embeddable langage. Maybe the answer
> > will be in 3) ?
> > Lua is awefully close and is an inspriation for Furth.
(http://www.lua.org/)
> > Shriram Krishnamurthi in a talk called "The Swine Before Perl" laid
> > out a list of 5 "gems" -- great ideas in language design, found in
> > Scheme, commendable to designers of new little languages.
> My question was more to know why Arch need a so specific embedded
> langage. But i should wait for your third roadmap !
No, it won't delve into that so I'll give a quick answer.
I want a very tiny and tractable interpreter which rules most of the
current ones right out. A core furth interpreter seems to add about,
oh, maybe 32K over and above libhackerlab -- yet it has all the "gems"
(continuations, closures, etc.) That's one reason to want furth,
specifically.
Another reason is that furth _isn't_ "so specific embedded language".
It's a VM on which tiny languages for many different paradigms can be
implemented nicely.
Here's an example of how the issue of the need for a language creeps
into arch. Consider our configuration files. We have:
~/.arch-params/hooks
~/.arch-params/signing/*
$proj/{arch}/=tagging-method
$library/=greedy
$library/=sparse
_These_ all have "ad hoc" syntaxes and semantics, and all different.
Are we going to just keep adding such things, indefinately? Or
start making a systematic way to manage them?
I want to add a whole bunch of new configs, some of which can be
pretty complicated. It'd be a good idea to get systematic about this
lest we demostrate Greenspun's 10th law....
-t
eenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: "Any sufficiently complicated C
or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc,
informally-specified bug-ridden slow
implementation of half of Common Lisp."
- Re: [Gnu-arch-users] arch roadmap 1 (and "what's tom up to"), (continued)
- Re: [Gnu-arch-users] arch roadmap 1 (and "what's tom up to"), Aaron Bentley, 2004/06/30
- Re: [Gnu-arch-users] arch roadmap 1 (and "what's tom up to"), Tom Lord, 2004/06/30
- Re: [Gnu-arch-users] arch roadmap 1 (and "what's tom up to"), Tom Lord, 2004/06/30
- Re: [Gnu-arch-users] arch roadmap 1 (and "what's tom up to"), Aaron Bentley, 2004/06/30
- [Gnu-arch-users] Re: arch roadmap 1 (and "what's tom up to"), Miles Bader, 2004/06/30
- Re: [Gnu-arch-users] arch roadmap 1 (and "what's tom up to"), Colin Walters, 2004/06/30
- Re: [Gnu-arch-users] arch roadmap 1 (and "what's tom up to"), Tom Lord, 2004/06/30
- Re: [Gnu-arch-users] arch roadmap 1 (and "what's tom up to"),
Tom Lord <=
- Re: [Gnu-arch-users] arch roadmap 1 (and "what's tom up to"), Andrew Suffield, 2004/06/30
- Re: [Gnu-arch-users] arch roadmap 1 (and "what's tom up to"), Tom Lord, 2004/06/30
- Re: [Gnu-arch-users] arch roadmap 1 (and "what's tom up to"), Andrew Suffield, 2004/06/30
- Re: [Gnu-arch-users] arch roadmap 1 (and "what's tom up to"), James Blackwell, 2004/06/30
- Re: [Gnu-arch-users] arch roadmap 1 (and "what's tom up to"), Tom Lord, 2004/06/30
- Re: [Gnu-arch-users] arch roadmap 1 (and "what's tom up to"), Michael Poole, 2004/06/30
- [Gnu-arch-users] Re: arch roadmap 1 (and "what's tom up to"), Miles Bader, 2004/06/30
Re: [Gnu-arch-users] arch roadmap 1 (and "what's tom up to"), Colin Walters, 2004/06/30