On 2010-Mar-24 14:11:21 +0100, Ivan Voras <ivo...@freebsd.org> wrote: >Since the issue comes around very rarely, I assume there are not many >people who also get the shivers when they see a shell script (and then a >"posixy" /bin/sh shell script) more than a 100 lines long? :)
With the specific exception of GNU configure and related horrors, I personally don't have anything against shell scripts. You can write good or bad code in any language. >Wouldn't it be nice to have a "blessed" (i.e. present-in-base) script >language interpreter with a syntax that has evolved since the 1970-ies? There's awk (though it's somewhat restricted in its abilities to do anything more than text manipulation) but in principle, I agree. The requirements as I see them are (in no particular order): - BSD-compatible license - must be compatible with buildworld (primarily, it must be possible to cross-build) - contains a critical mass of users in the FreeBSD developer (and ideally committer) community - language must be reasonably stable - will a script written today still work correctly in (say) 5 years. - must be acceptable to the vast majority of the user base (no religious wars allowed) >There was once Perl in base and even though I personally dislike Perl at >least it was a standard of sorts and guaranteed to be there if needed. It was removed because it didn't support cross-building (buildworld is always done as a cross-build) and was evolving at a rate incompatible with the base system. >As a possible alternative, or at least to learn about others' opinion on >the subject, I'd like to suggest Lua (http://www.lua.org/). As someone who has never used Lua, how well does it meet the requirements above? -- Peter Jeremy
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