On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 08:34:33PM -0700, Garrett D'Amore wrote: > > "Don't parse complex output. If you need a specific value, provide > >an option to deliver the specific value" > > > And therein lies my sort of backhanded comment about XML. I don't > understand all the effort being put into making output from these tools > "parseable" from whatever scripting language du jour. It seems to me > that there are other possibly superior solutions:
Shells are *NOT* a "scripting language du jour." The shells have been around for a long time. Shells are not as cool as Perl5, Python, Ruby, whatever. True. All of those have cool libraries with bindings for lots of C APIs. Fine, but the shells won't go away. Shell scripting might be something we want to discourage, but until we decide to do that I don't think we should blow off cases like this one. Nico --
