Re: scsh as scripting language

At Tue, 31 Mar 2009 17:00:19 +0200,
Andreas Bernauer wrote:
> scsh gets in my way with its surprisingly complex syntax for
> scripts and poor diagnostic messages.
> [...]
> But even when I'd be willing to write structures, ',config ,load' and ',open'
> them in scsh to debug them, my "biggest show stopper" still holds: errors don't
> tell you where they come from.

I feel that all these problems as well as the 64-bit issues are really
problems with the underlying Scheme 48. Scheme 48 has progressed
somewhat in regards to the 64-bit issue, but unfortunately Scheme 48
never really had the right hooks to layer scsh on top, so scsh ended up
dragging around its own old scheme48 implementation. However, I'm not
sure if it would really be in the best future interests of scsh to
simply upgrade to a newer scheme48, since I don't think think that the
64-bit issue is the main problem, as much as the scheme 48 module
system.

Aside from all the POSIX and shell scripting extensions, Olin tried to
make a workable syntax to use the Scheme 48 packages system from the
command line. Someone else pointed out his rationale in terms of trying
to deal with limitations on "#!" while trying to leave the Scheme 48
module system unchanged. In my opinion, this was a difficult problem and
he provided a reasonable solution given the constraints he imposed on
himself.

I personally probably would not have picked Scheme 48 as a basis for
scsh because the module system design intentionally called for it to be
a bit of a level on top of Scheme and I would have preferred something
that I could more programmaticly manipulate within a script, instead of
require a meta language and all the extra interactive ,config ,load,
open stuff.

-bri