[298] in Zephyr_Comments
Re: Zwgc description language
eichin@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (eichin@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Tue Jun 6 21:55:08 1989
C vs. Lisp? Both are awful. They are designed to be straightforward *to PARSE*
(and C doesn't even do that well), not to use... Forth takes some of this
to its logical extreme, there is even an emacs-like editor with a forth-like
(TRAC) customization language.
What might *really* be useful, instead of Yet Another Silly MicroLanguage,
is some sort ofvisual interface, so that the user can create a look with
a visual editor (like idraw or such) and then tag it to things (with menus
or prompt boxes or such.) Then you can get away with a lisp-like
internal language, since *NOONE EVER NEEDS TO USE IT*. Interleaf saves its
text files in a lisp-ish syntax, easy for programs to generate, and not
ever seen by normal users. Andrew adds its "funky stuff" ina TeX like
syntax, which is also awful to use, but again the user doesn't touch it,
so it is ok if its just easy for hackers.
