Mail Archives: geda-user/2012/11/18/11:36:22
On 11/18/2012 06:41 AM, John Doty wrote:
> Unfortunately, it's written in Haskell, which effectively means that
> only its author can write back ends for it. He has expressed an
> interest in rewriting it in Guile, which would put it more in the
> gEDA main stream, although it seems only a small minority of us can
> write Guile scripts.
...which is something that I just don't get. Scheme has got to be the
simplest, cleanest programming language I've ever seen. If a supposedly
"technical" person cannot wrap his/her brain around Scheme, then perhaps
a different line of work is in order.
That said, I CAN write in Scheme, and I use gschem and PCB nearly
every day, and I've never found it necessary to write a Scheme script.
I may eventually, and to be clear, I want the capability to remain,
but I've yet to run across a situation in which I need it. I would like
to do some really neat stuff with it, but in the meantime (and this
seems to be the case perpetually) I have a deadline to meet for a new
design.
The one comment I will make about the use of Guile in gschem is in the
context of config files. Config files should not be executable
programs. That's Just Plain Wrong for a bunch of reasons and it REALLY
needs to go away and be replaced by a proper configuration file syntax
and matching parser. If one does not want to write Scheme scripts to
use with gschem, and has no other reason to learn Scheme, one should not
be required to learn it (even the basic tidbits of its tiny syntax
required for this task) just to set up a config file for a piece of
software.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
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