[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Plans for 1.12

[Tomasz Wegrzanowski <maniek@xxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Jun 26, 2000 at 11:33:44AM +0200, Artur Biesiadowski wrote:
> Tobias Bengtsson wrote:
> 
> > Why dont we use perl? Perl exists on more platforms than GUILE, more people
> > know how to code it.
> 
> 1) Perl is ugly. It wasn't designed it just grown one layer on another.

UNIX was grown one layer on another, too.
Did you REALLY think fork()/exec() was anything more than a quick hack ???

Think about HTTP. HTML. Even Freeciv ;-).
Designed things can't live longer than a few years
and were never so successful as evolutionary ones.

And ugly/beauty issue is very personal.

> 2) I agree that more people know perl, but scheme is easier to learn.
> One would have to learn freeciv interface anyway and such calls will
> compromise most of code, with all that is left being few loop/if
> statements

LISP-derivate easier to learn ?
If you know C, you can start programing perl after 5-minute course.
Show me such 5-minute tutorial for scheme.

> 3) Compare runtime size of guile and perl. Installation size. 

In kB

Instalation size (Debian) :
guile           1356
perl-base       1328

Runtime size (for loop program) :
perl: 804 shared + 124 private
dunno how to check guile

> 4) Guile is very easily embedded from C application. I don't know about
> perl, but in most cases I've seen the opposite there - perl calling into
> C code (like the JNI java methods). How easy is to embed perl and calls
> single functions for evaluating things etc ? How well would perl garbage
> collector interacts with C memory management in freeciv ? (I don't know
> answers so maybe it is not a 'against' argument)

Guile has a garbage collector too.

> 5) Guile/scheme allows you to run scripts in custom environment, not
> exporting any dangerous functions like disk access etc. I'm not sure if
> it is really important as all scripts will be less or more trusted, but
> it is nice feature to have just in case.

There was such thing for Perl, don't know if project is still alive.
OT: Do you know even m4 has such problem ?

> 6) As far as platforms are concerned, guile indeed wasn't running on
> non-unix platforms last time I've checked, but there is another scheme
> interpreter called mzscheme, which runs on more platforms. With simple
> wrapper it is possible to choose one of them at compile time without
> changing any code on either scheme or freeciv code.

I had perl (5.004 only) on Win9x.

Is mzscheme free ?
Where can I get one ? (I have no such thing on Debian)