Re: [Gnu-arch-users] new language, arch, furth, etc.

[Tom Lord]

    > From: "Pierce T.Wetter III" <address@hidden>

    >   If Tom is listening, could you put into the stack of things to
    > talk about how you see communication with external processes fit
    > into your new language? That's my major issue.

I'm not sure what problems you include in the scope of "communication
with external processes".   I'll mention a couple points that I think
might be relevent:


* There's no avoiding parsing

  Not everything can be a string -- configuration variables are 
  sometimes going to be bound to "structured data".  Any process
  that wants to process configuration source text will need to have
  a parser that does more than copy a string from the source text.

  Therefore, one goal for the design is to make the parsing 
  (a) very well defined;  (b) very easy to implement.

  The intention here is that many programs can be extended with such a
  parser, that that adds very little new code or new run-time
  overhead, and that everyone can parse these definitions in the same
  way.


* Special cases can be specially handled

  Many unix programs (for example) expect a limited form of
  "structured data" as input, most often a list of lines,
  sometimes a list of lines divided into fields.

  In those cases where it makes sense for a particular datum,
  I don't see why tla (or some other tool) can't do that conversion
  for the sake of other programs.   E.g., read in a list (a b c)
  but print three lines, "a", "b", and "c".


It's nice that, so far, nobody has said "Well, why not use XML?" :-)

-t