Re: Pre-alpha scripting engine

[Yoshinori K. Okuji]

On Wednesday 19 January 2005 14:01, Marco Gerards wrote:
> But as I said before, the most important thing that needs to be done
> is that Okuji agrees with the syntax.

Honestly speaking, I don't know.

I also prefer that it looks more like BASH, but shell scripting is 
sometimes very ugly (e.g. "i = `expr $i + 1`"). So I don't know what 
the best is.

But I bet that these should be right:

- GRUB should not distinguish command execution from scripting.

- The language must not enforce users to learn really new things.

- The language should be flexible enough to do many things without 
writing modules in C.

The first item is a must for GRUB, because the strongest advantage in 
GRUB is that you can do whatever at run time. Once we accept that 
scripting can do more than from the command line, we would lose 
complete control of booting process.

I think the first one suggests that we should not have multiple 
languages. There is a way to have multiple ones without breaking that 
policy (i.e. embedding a language in another language), but this sounds 
overkill to me.

So a scripting language should fit into the semantics of the 
command-line interface. For example, Lisp is not acceptable, because it 
is too difficult to use as a shell. I don't know if PHP-like syntax 
fulfills this requirement, but I don't like it very much, because PHP 
is really similar to Perl (which is known as a maker of write-only 
code).

I'd like to hear others' opinions. I have been thinking this issue for 
some years, but I still don't know a good answer.

Okuji