[315] in Zephyr Mailing List
Re: undead zwgcs
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Tue Sep 22 14:15:10 1998
To: Ken Raeburn <raeburn@cygnus.com>
Cc: griffon@snurgle.org, zephyr@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "22 Sep 1998 13:30:18 EDT."
<tx190jc2gyd.fsf@cygnus.com>
Date: Tue, 22 Sep 1998 14:09:05 EDT
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
> But does sl do anything about quoting, loop and conditional
> structures, providing user variables, defining functions, etc? (I
> haven't looked.) That's my main point, not the line editing. The
> ss code fails completely in those areas.
It's a good thing they're totally outside the scope of zctl's
functionality.
There is no particular reason to make zctl programmable (which would
drastically expand the realm of historical user expectations as well
as bring in a dependency on some giant ball of hair like tcl or perl)
as long as it has a predictable tool-like interface. Anything
complicated can be done in a scripting language like, say, /bin/sh.
Even adding line-editing would be a poor idea, in my opinion. zctl's
uses are pretty much all non-interactive.
(zwgc is an entirely different matter. One of the issues there is
that there has to be backward compatibility for people with existing
.zwgc.desc files, so if any language is going to replace the zwgc
interpreter, it should be a decent target language. Scratch tcl and
probably perl.)
