On Wed, May 12, 2004 at 03:58:03PM +0100, Jonathan Dowland wrote: > Well, I'm divided on the matter. There's nothing to stop you programming > WMI - its open source after all. Lua does make things easier but at a > cost in terms of dependencies, size (I've been trying to squeeze > lua+ion2 into my uni account's disk space) and it more or less prevents > graphical tools being used for configuration.
Size should not be a significant issue. If you don't have other programs that would use Lua, don't link it dynamically. Also don't use dynamically loaded modules with Ion (PRELOAD_MODULES=1). That will give you about 100k. The way Ion2 uses Lua indeed pretty much prevents external configuration tools. But in Ion3 bindings are defined by passing strings containing the function call and this should help external tools read the files. They will still in practise need to use Lua to read the files, but they can know what is bound where. There are other problems with this like more complicated syntax thanks to string quotation, but since a lot of people seem to have trouble understanding anonymous functions, the Ion3 way is probably better. I think the biggest problem with using a programming language for configuration is error-tolerance. If you have one small error somewhere, the whole file may become unusable. But Ion's old configuration file format isn't that robust either given the brace-enclosed sections. Something like the Windows (and whatever else uses it) .ini format should be quite good in this respect, though. XML is absolutely out of question as a format for anything that a human might want to edit. So, using a programming language for configuration has problems, but then, scripting is really nice to have and having separate languages for scripting and configuration languages makes things too complicated. -- Tuomo
