Re: [Gnu-arch-users] arch roadmap 1 (and "what's tom up to")

[Charles Duffy]

On Wed, 2004-06-30 at 16:30, James Blackwell wrote:
> I suspect that many of our users are intimidated by regexes, and
> can barely handle *that*. What on earth are we going to do with the
> political reprocussions of having to tell them that they'll have to
> learn a new language just to configure an archive?

Think "configuration file syntax" instead of "language", then. There's
presumably no obligation to use "language features" rather than things
one might consider generic "configuration file format" if one doesn't
want to.

Personally, though, I'd love to have something like bigloo's pattern
language available for inventory rules -- it's vastly easier to
programatically parse and modify than the regex syntaxes, not to mention
more intuitive (for the user who doesn't know either to start with, at
least).


(For more on said pattern language, see section 6.2 of
http://www-sop.inria.fr/mimosa/fp/Bigloo/doc/bigloo-7.html#Pattern-Matching)