Re: Perl embedding: trial balloon

Hrvoje> To rephrase: the C code I've written today is not Hrvoje> guaranteed to be safe, and neither will John's code he Hrvoje> writes tomorrow be guaranteed to be safe. But if he Hrvoje> writes it well, the resulting Perl-Emacs combinations Hrvoje> (what a horror) *will* be safe, and that's what counts. And I wrote: Hrvoje> So what's your point? If code written to the standards you describe is John's target, then (modulo esthetic considerations) giving this group of users what they want is a good thing. I am under the impression that to write this stuff to such standards is going to be within an order of magnitude of reimplementing the Lisp engine in Common Lisp or Scheme. Not as big, but big. Do you disagree about the scale of the task? I suspect John does. I know John's already done a _lot_ of work; it's possible that he's very close already, and it's just a matter of porting the current Perlmacs and doing some fine-tuning. But if not, the Perlmacs patch could end up getting backed out, as ImageMagick did, if his goals aren't congruent with the mainline. He'd be asked to do most of the work, since most (I think it is safe to say) current developers are unsympathetic to the project. It would be unfair if it basically came down to John being asked to clean up lots of devilish details and obscure crashes, and that wasn't what he had in mind. My impression is that John is looking for maximum Perl capability for the implementation effort (quite rightly by itself, of course), is willing to trade off rare crashes for immediate power (his reaction was "it works well for me"), and doesn't think that the implicit `(require 'perl-stuff)' scenario is show-stoppingly important (his initial reaction was "it's the Lisp programmer's problem"). That is all I have to go on, so I know this may be an inaccurate characterization of what he really thinks. But that's my impression. John? -- University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091 __________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________ What are those two straight lines for? "Free software rules."