[I'm sending a copy of this message to Tom Lord, in case he is not on
this list. Maybe you can point out mistakes I might have done?]
Since the discussion goes on whether to base scsh on another Scheme
implementation, let me ask, what exactly makes SCM a bad choice? I
don't count the recent flame.
As you know, SCM is the base of guile and cygnus recently announced
their plans to hire two additional full-time people for guile work,
one documentation writer and one coder. Those are resources that can
be very useful for fixing things that are time-consuming and boring.
Guile intents to be a collection of a number of useful
libraries. Making scsh such a library would mean:
- scsh would be distributed to a much wider audience.
- this audience, having installed guile for other reason, would have
scsh available on their system. That makes evaluating scsh much
easier.
- scsh could use all the libraries. Imagine what you could do with the
Tk GUI toolkit in scsh "shell" script.
- Maybe scsh could profit from additional syntaxes planned for
Guile when going towards some form of elegant syntax for interactive
shell work.
- I'm sure the guile people will implement something like scsh
sooner or later, limiting scsh's audience further.
- Guile is probably the Scheme implementation with the best chances to
get a fancy development environment in the near future.
All these are have to do with availiable resources and I wonder if
these don't outweight technical problems that the current
implementation of SCM might have.
Of course, doing so would place major parts of scsh under the GPL. Is
that a problem?
I'm new to this list, so please be gentle. But I really appreciate any
founded opinion on why SCM is technically bad, in any form :-)
Happy hacking
Martin
P.S. Is there an archive of this list available?
--
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Martin Cracauer <cracauer@wavehh.hanse.de>
|