Eric W. Sink writes:
>It has been our intention all along for AbiWord, as well as the other
>applications in AbiSuite, to have a scripting language. Our plan of
>record has been to use JavaScript, specifically, the implementation
>from Netscape. We're starting to revisit this issue. We'd like to
>ask for the opinions of people on the list. It *may* result in yet
>another scripting language flame war, (we hope not) but we're
>asking anyway. :-)
What exactly is the scripting language going to be used for?
I'm not very clear on what its application domain will be, and think
that has to be very clear before making any decision. Is it going to
be for writing powerful plug-ins that do elaborate operations (say,
something which looks for URLs in a document, accesses them, inserts
the page title or flags ones that return 404) or is it just for simple
macro uses, just above the level of search-and-replace operations? If
the latter, then JavaScript may be enough; otherwise, you'll need a
real programming language, and Python may be the most straightforward
of your choices.
Gordian-knot proposal: why not just expose a documented
C-level API, and SWIG it (http://www.swig.org)? That would win you
Python, Perl, Guile, and Tcl all at once, and as a bonus, you'd have a
C-level API for plug-ins that need as much performance as possible.
Add JavaScript support to SWIG and you'd have all four available.
Fans of Pike, TOM, or whatever could then write their own interfaces.
--
A.M. Kuchling http://starship.skyport.net/crew/amk/
Prediction is very difficult, especially of the future.
-- Niels Bohr
