From owner-freebsd-libh  Mon Oct 23 13:40:58 2000
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Date: Mon, 23 Oct 2000 13:40:43 -0700
From: Tim Kientzle <kientzle@acm.org>
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To: Jordan Hubbard <jkh@winston.osd.bsdi.com>, libh@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: BOF at BSDCon: FreeBSD Installer, Packages System
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Jordan Hubbard wrote:
> Well, fortunately, TCL is both compact ... and well-known to many.

My impression is that most of the "off-the-shelf" script languages
(Python, Perl, Tcl, etc, etc) started off small but have since
become quite bloated.  I just compiled a short C program (given below)
with an embedded Tcl interpreter and got a 530k stripped executable.
Is that acceptable for sysinstall?

#include <stdio.h>
#include <tcl8.0/tcl.h>

int main(int argc, char **argv) {
  char *script = "set a 44";
  Tcl_Interp * interp = Tcl_CreateInterp();
  int result = Tcl_Eval(interp,script);
  puts(interp->result);
  if(result != TCL_OK) exit(1);
  exit(0);
}

> Forth ...  has such an acceptance problem ...  Likewise
> lisp ... is a pretty hard sell ...

True, which is why I didn't push either one.  I spent a few years
doing Forth development and really liked it,  but I've learned not
to champion it too loudly.

> As to BASIC, well, ICK.

<ROFL> ... Apparently, another hard sell.  ;-)  I was thinking,
of course, of the more modern structured BASIC implementations
(Visual Basic is the best-known) which draw heavily on Pascal and C.
(Perl is heavily influenced by structured Basic, for example.)

If Tcl is sufficiently compact, it's a good choice (even despite it's
somewhat "unique" syntax); I'm just not sure that the current Tcl
systems are sufficiently compact.  (I guess you could dig up an old
version...)

				- Tim


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