[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Plans for 1.12

[Jed Davis <jldavis@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

--On Monday, 26 June 2000 17:54 -0400 Daniel Burrows 
<Daniel_Burrows@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>   The Lisp syntax is much more simple and consistent than anything
>   C-derived, with Perl being maybe one of the worst offenders I've seen.
As much as I like Perl, I have to agree; the syntax makes C++'s look simple.

>   It's not 5 minutes, but you can probably find at least one at
> http://www.schemers.org.  A somewhat technical introduction is at:
> ftp://ftp.cs.utexas.edu/pub/garbage/cs345/schintro-v14/schintro_toc.html
>
>   I recently worked on a project with someone who learned Scheme
>   overnight when I asked if he would be able to pick it up.  Of course,
> he didn't know or understand the deep structure of Scheme, or the many
> tricks and idioms that are available.  If you can get those in Perl from
> a 5 minute course, I'd be amazed.
I somehow doubt that it's really 5 minutes; of course, with Perl there are 
at least half a dozen ways to do any given thing, so there's a big 
difference between knowing enough of the language and knowing a lot of the 
language.
> > > 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.
>   Yes, but it respects the C stack, which makes it very easy to embed.
>   Perl, if it's anything like Python, will require you to clutter the
> code up with lots of refcounting cruft.
Specifically, Guile uses a mark-and-sweep GC, which requires only a single 
bit here and there, which is (somehow) quietly extracted from the typing 
system.
--Jed