On 02 Dec 2002 22:51:17 -0600, Tim Legant <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Err, umm, heh heh... > > <grin> > > > Please, everyone, do not jump all over my back for saying this. > > No back jumping in this forum.
Hey, if you've ever suggested anything even remotely radical on lists like djbdns then you can understand my hesitancy. They would make you wish you had never been born. > It would be neat for you and me and other Python coders, but would be, > I think, noticeably more difficult for non-coders. Python, as clean > as it is, still has certain syntactic elements that don't really make > sense to non-coders, such as indentation and trailing colons. The > filter language today doesn't have conditionals, or nested block > structures, etc. and seems to be relatively easy for non-coders to > pick up. I'm not sure we want to require entry level Python skills > just to use TMDA. Okay, then let me suggest this in a slightly different way... We want to take a configuration file in some format and turn it into something easily executed by a filter program. That gives us: Config file -> Intermediate format -> Parser program What the intermediate format is, isn't critically important to most users. I guess at the moment it's a list of dictionaries or something? Or perhaps it is more proceedural and isn't easily represented as data. No matter. Let's further suppose that the config file is exactly as it is now, but we choose to make the intermediate format Python code instead of data. I'm going to guess that it would not take an amazingly sophisticated piece of code to convert one into the other. Now we're precompiling config files into executable code. The user is none-the-wiser. So what about the more advanced users who can handle the notion of indenting and colons? You got it. Write the intermediate file and skip the config file & precompilation. Best of both worlds. Gre7g. _________________________________________________ tmda-workers mailing list ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) http://tmda.net/lists/listinfo/tmda-workers
