On Fri, Aug 20, 2004 at 01:06:49PM -0400, Dave McGuire wrote: > On Aug 20, 2004, at 12:57 PM, Stuart Brorson wrote: > >>>Perhaps back in the stone age, when PCB was written for the=20 > >>>Altair 8800^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Atari [2], generating symbols on the > >>>fly > >>>from an M4 macro was a good idea in order to save space memory.=20 > >>> > >>Seems to have totally misunderstood. > > > >Well, perhaps I don't know exactly why M4 was used to generate symbols > >when PCB was written over 20 years ago. But I *do* think I know a > >thing or two about circuit design. And from the standpoint of a > >circuit designer (i.e. our target audience for gEDA), M4 is > >unnecessarily old, scary, nasty, and obscure. For PCB to make inroads > >into the circuit design community, it needs to act and feel like a > >contemporary PCB layout tool. M4 is unnecessary baggage. Footprint > >files -- i.e. PCB's second lib -- are the way it's done these days. > >Creating parameterized footprints using stand-alone TCL, Perl, or > >Python scripts would be more attractive and more contemporary. > > M4 is "obscure" and TCL, Perl, and Python are not?? > > M4 has shipped with EVERY UNIX-like OS for the past 20+ years. By my > definition, that's called "ubiquitous", not "obscure".
This is good. m4 is everywhere. I am always getting upset when I realize what all uber-modern scripting languages I have to install until the particular application I am downloading thru freshmeat at the moment starts to work. > Use a scripting language to process macros instead of a macro > processor, in other words. > > PERL (you know, the Practical Extension and Reporting Language) is > not the right tool for this job. PERL is constantly changing it's versions and it would result in old scripts not working, IMHO. Cl<
