Re: use of guile.

[Josh Yelon <jyelon cs uiuc edu>]

> There is one thing in gnome I'd like to know the origin of: guile.
> The reason is that I cannot stand lisp (and thus scheme). 

There actually is a good reason to use Lisp.  To make a good scripting
language, you have to take an existing language, and add weird stuff. 
Take emacs-lisp: they started with lisp, and then added stuff like
"save-excursion" and "make-local-variable".  That's not just adding
functions, that's adding whole new language constructs.

To add new constructs to a language like C or Perl, you have to add new
grammar rules.  That's a real mess, look what happened to C++ when they
added a few grammar rules to C -- they ended up with a language that's
so hard to parse that they STILL don't have a C++ compiler that can
handle it all.  On the other hand, when you add constructs to a language
like Lisp, there's no new grammar rules.  You only have to write a
macro.  That really is a critical feature for a scripting language
foundation.

If that isn't a convincing argument, well, OK, I agree.  You can make a
language that has the same property (no new grammar rules) and isn't
near as ugly as lisp.

On the upside, the guile project will be adding parsers to the guile
system (they'll parse a file and convert the code into scheme on the
fly).  So you'll be able to use guile as a basic interpreter, for
example.  Although that does create a potential
user-interface-consistency problem.

- Josh