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sm-sorcery - Re: [SM-Sorcery]Language wars...

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Subject: Discussion of Sorcery related topics

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Chronological Thread  
  • From: Aaron Brice <abrice2 AT cox.net>
  • To: Sergey A Lipnevich <sergeyli AT pisem.net>
  • Cc: Tony Smith <tony AT smee.org>, sm-sorcery AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [SM-Sorcery]Language wars...
  • Date: 07 Oct 2002 19:52:59 -0700

On Mon, 2002-10-07 at 08:59, Sergey A Lipnevich wrote:
> One of the things neglected about Sorcery is that it relies on the file
> system as its primary storage, a kind of database. Spell name's primary
> source is its directory name, /not/ the name in DETAILS, so your first
> example is wrong. If DETAILS has the spell name different from its
> directory name, it's a bug. So, in your example 1, there is no need to
> parse DETAILS files at all.
>

Using the file system as a kind of database in my opinion is one of
sorcery's weaknesses right now. Why not use a database as a kind of
database? How much faster would finding dependencies be if you could
just "select from dependency_table where depends_on='mozilla'"? I think
it would be great to not only switch to Perl, but to switch to Perl,
MySQL, and XML.

> Environment is one of the components of the application platform, so,
> however unusual that may sound, bash is our application platform,
> because it is our tool of maintaining state during execution. Note that,
> using Perl, you have to change the structure of sorcery to at least have
> a central script that runs everything, otherwise your execution state is
> gone whenever the script finishes -- Perl's VM doesn't stay in memory
> after the script has finished, bash does. If we choose Mono, this will
> be our application platform, but it requires a server, for the same
> purpose -- maintain execution state.
>

This is not an issue. In the current structure there is always a
central script that calls other scripts, right?

> That's why bash is better than anything as a lightweight application
> platform -- it stays between script executions, Perl, Python, C++, etc,
> do not have such advantage without extra effort. It has many programming
> disadvantages, but believe it or not, it's not the worst infrastructure
> we may have.
>

Can you give an example of a script that runs and relies on an
environment variable set by another script that's not its parent? Seems
like bad design to me..

> How's that for language wars :-)?
>

There's no point in getting into a language war since it's obvious to
everyone that perl is by far the greatest language ever invented. I'm
going to include a "smiley" now in order to indicate the joking nature
of the previous statement. :)

Aaron






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