Interpreted language(s) in the base

[Andrew Milton]

+-------[ Luigi Rizzo ]----------------------
| On Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 11:43:41PM +1000, Andrew Reilly wrote:
| > 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).
| 
| slightly off topic but I disagree  on the latter part.
| 
| The whole point of having source code is to be able to make
| modifications, small or large, private or ones to be contributed
| back. As a teacher, i am very concerned about the ease-of-use for
| non-developer types: it is important to make it easy for people to
| experiments, as this is one of the ways people learn things.

I have to agree with Luigi. You have to work out your target audience,
and that should be your first constraint to choosing the language.

If the language has a syntax structure that's going to be hard to parse
by non-developers at first glance (like forth or perl), then you're really
limiting the userbase.

C is scriptable and embeddable these days from a variety of projects,
but, I wouldn't recommend that either necessarily (since C doesn't
have dynamic typing), even if we could get 100% architecture coverage.

-- 
Andrew Milton
akm at theinternet.com.au