Jason Stover <[email protected]> writes: > I attended the FSF annual meeting recently. At the dinner after the > first day, I spoke to a couple of developers about scheme and Guile > and functional programming. I talked about the problem I had > making large data structures to accumulate and store sufficient > statistics (like the covariance matrix). We all agreed that a Lisp-ish > language would be better suited to addressing such tasks. I think > both Ben and John would agree in principal.
I agree in principle that it would be nice to be able to develop for PSPP in more languages than C, and I understand that Guile is the language that the GNU project has endorsed as an extension language for all GNU software. But I wonder whether our users would be better served by choosing a different extension language. In particular, SPSS supports Python and R as extension languages. If PSPP were to support one (or both) of these languages for extension, then our users could reuse the extensions that they have already written. On the other hand, if we were to choose Guile, then they would have to learn an entirely different language (and in practice I think that they would choose not to do this). Another approach would be to integrate support for multiple languages using a tool such as SWIG (http://www.swig.org/), which supports Guile, Python, R, and other languages. -- Ben Pfaff http://benpfaff.org _______________________________________________ pspp-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pspp-dev
