On Fri, May 16, 2008 at 01:59:57PM +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> John Meacham writes:
>
> > I think it would be an interesting project to work on, something nice
> > and declarative that compiled to portable 'sh'.
>
> Excuse me? That's *exactly* the requirement that led to autoconf.
No, autoconf is not declarative, it is iteratively processed sh through
m4. It does eventually lead to sh, but I wouldn't say it is compiled to
it. In particular, since it is processed sh, all of your control
constructs are that of sh (since they just fall through the
preprocessing).
There is a difference in the approach in that it is impossible to
divorce autoconf from its 'sh' roots. my ideal system would be able to
compile to portable 'sh' in addition to other back ends. 'sh' for unixy
systems, ? for windows (javascript? hypercard? .NET? hmm..). Sort of
like how 'cook' can compile cookbooks to portable sh so people don't
need to have it installed, even though cookbooks themselves are their
own language.
Though... I can ssh into my cell phone and compile nethack for it, every
asus motherboard/laptop is coming with linux in hardware, surely that is
a sign that all the world will be unixy soon enough :)
John
--
John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈
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