Re: [orca-list] Punctuation, capital letters, exchange of characters and strings, generally error in the design of Orca

[Michael Whapples <mwhapples aim com>]

Hello,
While not wanting to continue this discussion/argument longer than need
be, I will briefly state my views.

I feel something such as speech-dispatcher is sufficiently core, and may
be used by minimal apps (eg. brltty, yasr, etc) that to some (and in
some cases be difficult) to have a python interpretor available. This I
feel is a good reason for trying to avoid using python for something
such as speech dispatcher.

As for the performance issues, I am slightly more split as there are
various ways in which a python lib (or python like lib) can be improved
for better performance. There are things like psyco which can take
standard python code and generally improve the performance quite a bit
(admittedly not to the same speed as a C version), although psyco is
only suited to particular processor architectures. Then there are things
like cython (based on pyrex) which takes python like code and creates a
C extension for python. There is also weave which allows C code inline
in python scripts. None of these I have suggested will solve the issue
of actually needing the python interpretor, although they can improve
the performance.

In the case of orca, I feel the need for python isn't such a problem as
gnome requires so much space anyway that adding python to the list of
dependencies won't make a big difference.

Thanks if anyone is still paying attention to the thread, and let's try
and make some movement forward.

Michael Whapples