Re: Admin tools - idea from left field

[Rob Browning <rlb@cs.utexas.edu>]

David Welton <davidw@master.debian.org> writes:

> The other problem with Guile is that, last time I checked, it wanted
> to take over your main() - it doesn't play real friendly with C, in
> some ways.  I think that is being fixed, but this is something one
> would want to be sure of...  Not to mention that it loads a bunch of
> junk and is kind of slow.

As you point out, all these things can (should, and hopefully will) be
fixed.

> I was curious just to see how other peopl reacted - I'll post, I'm
> sure, if I ever decide to act on the idea.

I'm absolutely in favor of this, and I would certainly be willing to
help anyone who wanted to work on this (as I have the time).

Aside from the potential suffering caused by parenphobia, having a
consistent config syntax that was as powerful as scheme/guile would be
a big win.  However,

  (a) You have to be careful here.  As Gordon pointed out, this would
      have to be grassroots, accepted becausee people understood the
      benefits.  You can't shove this kind of thing down anyone
      (especially the program developers' throats).

  (b) There can be safety issues (which can be resolved).

      Originally, I wanted to write a little extension to GnuCash that
      would spit out your financial data as a scheme file that just
      contained GnuCash function calls that, when loaded, would just
      re-create your data.  This would be *trivial* to code.  But I
      quickly realized that this was a potentially *huge* safety
      problem.  It would be entirely too easy for someone to slip you
      a "data file" containing hidden scheme code that would erase
      your hard drive.  So I'll just have to write the data as a set
      of scheme forms, and have a small parser.  However, this too is
      fairly trivial.  Given the nature of scheme, you get string
      escaping, recursive descent parsing, and basic data type and
      recursive data structure conversions for free...

FWIW.

-- 
Rob Browning <rlb@cs.utexas.edu> PGP=E80E0D04F521A094 532B97F5D64E3930