At Sat, 6 Oct 2007 15:55:14 -0600, John E Hein wrote:
Subject: Re: Scripting language choice (Was: Scripting the Amanda core)
>
> Yes. But please pick the scripting language on their own merits, not
> on backward-looking considerations

Indeed!

In fact that probably lobs both Python and Perl so far out the window so
quickly that they'll go into orbit or further.

If "we're" talking about something for scripting _within_ (i.e. in and
"embedded" sense) an application then you want a truly easily embeddable
interpreter, too, regardless of the language.

Once you narrow your search to limit it to existing "embeddable";
interpreted languages then you'll be much further along.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scripting_language#Extension.2Fembeddable_language

(and no neither Perl nor Python, despite their proponents claims, and
depsite the appearance of Python in the wikipedia entry, can be
effectively used as embedded scripting languages)

Traditionally lambda-based and functional languages have the most
advantages for use as embedded scripting languages.

Heck even ECMAScript, aka JavaShit, er, JavaScript, is not a bad choice
for this kind of systems-level tool. It's truly standardised, not that
ugly or horrible (just often mis-used in WWW applications), and very
widely used already, albeit not always by the kinds of people who might
want to play with Amanda.

> A bigger decision is whether to switch to using a scripting language
> at all.

Perhaps.

> I'm not convinced amanda shouldn't keep using good old C.

I wouldn't necessarily agree with that though. C is getting to be about
the worst possible language to consider for systems programming efforts.

There are much safer, but equally usable, efficient, and portable
languages available today -- some

--
Greg A. Woods

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On Sun, Oct 07, 2007 at 08:58:19PM -0400, Greg A. Woods wrote:
&gt; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scripting_language#Extension.2Fembeddable_language
>
> (and no neither Perl nor Python, despite their proponents claims, and
> depsite the appearance of Python in the wikipedia entry, can be
> effectively used as embedded scripting languages)

Out of curiosity; why not?
I've used python as a plugin-language for C projects before, and found
it to work out quite well.

With respect to dependencies, I guess one could build amanda statically
linked with python so to not create additional dependencies. Of course
that would make the amanda client bigger, so there is a tradeoff. There
may be license issues as well.

--
Ragnar Kjørstad

My 0.02 cents (euro-cents )

I vote for perl.

I'm probably one of those "admins that tend to know perl more
than python&quot;. And because "it just works";.

I've also written programs in Perl containing 2000+ lines in less
than 1 month, and making it structured is no more difficult than
another language. (And perl usually does not get in the way, when
I want it to be done like I need to.)

But if eventually python is choosen over perl, I would not object
or quit the project.

--
Paul Bijnens, xplanation Technology Services Tel +32 16 397.511
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http://www.xplanation.com/ email: Paul.Bijnens%40xplanation.com">Paul.Bijnensxplanation.com
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