Re: forwarded message from Lionel Fourquaux
On 21.06.01 at 23:03, Ben Wing <ben(a)666.com> wrote:
>OTOH, doing FTP protocol support in Lisp may be a /leeetle/
overkill as
>concerns this particular problem. :-)
i don't think it's overkill. is the ftp protocol really that hard?
Not at all. It's not a particularly pretty protocol, but it isn't really
that hard to implement. If you go to a C implementation there should be
several available libraries (the GNU FTP client springs to mind) and I'll
bet there are a plethora of C++ classes. I don't know Lisp -- what the hell
am I doing on this list? :-) -- but networking may be a bit harder there? I
wouldn't think it all that hard to do a pure Lisp implementation if the
networking primitives are there.
probably the code to parse the ftp.exe output is just as hairy.
Exactly! People tend to choose this route for "simplicity" and it ends up
with fragile, hairy, unmaintainable code several times the size of the
equivalent "native" FTP implementation.
Of course, most FTP clients contain a whole bunch of fragile, hairy,
unmaintainable special cases to deal with the various undefined output
formats and unimplemented commands -- :-) -- but at least you'll know it
when something went wrong and can compensate or give a usefull error
message.
OTOH, I don't know EFS so there may be a good reason why it's implemented
the way it is.