Interpreted language(s) in the base

[Andrew Reilly]

On Sun, Aug 15, 2010 at 11:15:55PM -0700, Doug Barton wrote:
> got any other suggestions?

This is very much a "sorry I asked" question, but is none-the
less quite a good one, given the size of the hole to be plugged.

I think that a reasonable answer for this sort of thing might be
one of the dynamic languages that compiles to C, like (perhaps)
one of the schemes (chicken, gambit-C, bigloo, etc).  You get
the benefit of flexibility and dynamism with good regexp and
data structure ability, good performance, and only requiring the
build tools available in the base system, as long as you don't
want to be the developer: just ship the C code (as well as the
source, of course).

Unfortunately it seems that quite a lot of people have issues
with lisp syntax these days.

There are some other compile-to-C languages that might work too.

[Aside: I think that the answer to this question might get a
*lot* more interesting once we have llvm in the base system (it
comes along with clang).  There are (and I'm sure will be
more) languages that compile down to llvm byte-code without the
contortions required in going through C.]

Cheers,

-- 
Andrew