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Re: Documentation proposal
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> From: "Greg J. Badros" <gjb@cs.washington.edu>
> Date: 08 Dec 1999 14:17:46 -0800
>
> Maciej Stachowiak <mstachow@alum.mit.edu> writes:
>
> > > Michael Livshin <mlivshin@bigfoot.com> writes:
> > >
> > > > "Harvey J. Stein" <hjstein@bfr.co.il> writes:
> > > >
> > > > > I'd probably do it if I felt there was general interest, but I don't
> > > > > think there is...
> > > >
> > > > you mean we are happy to have a Perl script extract Guile's core docs?
> > > > sacrilege!
> > > >
> > > > is the speed difference *that* bad?
> > >
> > > Factor of 20 at least, IIRC.
> > >
> > > I'm a believer in using the right language for the right task; Scheme
> > > isn't always the right language (I know, that's sacrilege, too!) and
> > > for text munging I prefer Perl.
> >
> > I hate to make decisions for political instead of technical reasons, but
> > Guile
> > is at least partly a political project, so I don't think it would be
> > appropriate to
> > make Perl a required part of the Guile build process. It may be a better
> > tool
> > right now but we're never going to convince people Guile is good for
> > anything
> > if we use Perl ourselves for such a critical task.
>
> And I think that may be the right thing to do in the long term. In the
> short term, I favor function over politics so I'm gonna make it fly and
> get it stable and documented before worrying about this issue (and
> probably leave it to the politicians to re-code in guile).
>
> Greg
>
I agree, but I also doubt that there's anything fundamental about guile
that precludes it being useful as a text-munging language; it's just the
speed of the current implementation of regexps etc. Personally, I'd love
to use guile as a text-munging language; think of the power the macro
system would give you!
Mike