Re: Interpreted language(s) in the base

On 19/08/2010, C. P. Ghost <cpghost_at_cordula.ws> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 3:43 PM, Andrew Reilly <areilly_at_bigpond.net.au>
> wrote:
>> On Sun, Aug 15, 2010 at 11:15:55PM -0700, Doug Barton wrote:
>>> got any other suggestions?
>>
>> This is very much a "sorry I asked" question, but is none-the
>> less quite a good one, given the size of the hole to be plugged.
>>
>> I think that a reasonable answer for this sort of thing might be
>> one of the dynamic languages that compiles to C, like (perhaps)
>> one of the schemes (chicken, gambit-C, bigloo, etc).  You get
>> the benefit of flexibility and dynamism with good regexp and
>> data structure ability, good performance, and only requiring the
>> build tools available in the base system, as long as you don't
>> want to be the developer: just ship the C code (as well as the
>> source, of course).
>>
>> Unfortunately it seems that quite a lot of people have issues
>> with lisp syntax these days.
>
> +1 for a scheme shell, but not for the heavy-weight variety that
> compiles to C, as that would tie them to a subset of ${ARCH}es.
>
> After all LISP-like syntax is *still* more common and prevalent
> than Lua, e.g. in Elisp, guile, esh, scsh and a lot of other apps
> that use it as a small language. So we can expect more users
> to be at least partially familiar with it. And there *are* lightweight
> MIT- or BSD-licensed scheme interpreters out there too:
>
> http://community.schemewiki.org/?scheme-faq-standards#implementations

Will have to disagree on that - part of the point of having such a
thing would be to attract young developers, and while the CS crowd
will be happy with LISP, anyone starting programming after the first
.com bubble will probably be repulsed by non-Algol-like syntaxes.