Re: Interpreted language(s) in the base

On 16/08/2010, at 4:15 PM, Doug Barton wrote:

> On Sun, 15 Aug 2010, Ivan Voras wrote:
> 
>> This is my long-term point - it really would be beneficial to have an
>> alternative, richer language in base which would fall between the
>> categories of "a good system language but far too complex for simple
>> string-parsing stuff" which is C and "a good glue language for system
>> utilities but lacking more evolved concepts" which is shell.
> 
> I sort of agree with you here, but I don't. :)  ONE of the reasons that perl was axed from the base was that it was very very hard to keep the bmake glue up to date. However, a bigger reason was that it was impossible to marry our concept of a "stable" branch with the ever-evolving world that was perl. We often had a situation where a long-lived stable branch would have a VERY stale version of perl in it, to the point that the only rational course of action was to disable the perl build and install a usable version from ports. We do not want to go back down that road. (And I'm not speculating here, I lived through it.)
> 

And lest anyone think "that's just perl", look at the history of TCL in the base system as well.