From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from mailman by lists.gnu.org with archive (Exim 4.43) id 1CrMd4-00054D-NC for mharc-grub-devel@gnu.org; Wed, 19 Jan 2005 15:40:39 -0500 Received: from mailman by lists.gnu.org with tmda-scanned (Exim 4.43) id 1CrMd1-00052B-Ua for grub-devel@gnu.org; Wed, 19 Jan 2005 15:40:36 -0500 Received: from exim by lists.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.43) id 1CrMd0-00051M-OX for grub-devel@gnu.org; Wed, 19 Jan 2005 15:40:34 -0500 Received: from [199.232.76.173] (helo=monty-python.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1CrMaz-0004OG-Uz for grub-devel@gnu.org; Wed, 19 Jan 2005 15:38:30 -0500 Received: from [212.43.237.68] (helo=kotoba.storever.com) by monty-python.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.34) id 1CrM42-0003xN-Ih for grub-devel@gnu.org; Wed, 19 Jan 2005 15:04:26 -0500 Received: from ASSP-nospam (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by kotoba.storever.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id A67E2F8D7D7C for ; Wed, 19 Jan 2005 21:04:23 +0100 (CET) Received: from 127.0.0.1 ([127.0.0.1] helo=localhost) by ASSP-nospam ; 19 Jan 05 20:04:23 -0000 From: "Yoshinori K. Okuji" Organization: enbug.org To: The development of GRUB 2 Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2005 21:04:41 +0100 User-Agent: KMail/1.7.1 References: <41ED6964.9010102@list.ru> <87oeflwp1n.fsf@marco.marco-g.com> In-Reply-To: <87oeflwp1n.fsf@marco.marco-g.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Message-Id: <200501192104.41983.okuji@enbug.org> Subject: Re: Pre-alpha scripting engine X-BeenThere: grub-devel@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list Reply-To: The development of GRUB 2 List-Id: The development of GRUB 2 List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2005 20:40:37 -0000 On Wednesday 19 January 2005 14:01, Marco Gerards wrote: > But as I said before, the most important thing that needs to be done > is that Okuji agrees with the syntax. Honestly speaking, I don't know. I also prefer that it looks more like BASH, but shell scripting is sometimes very ugly (e.g. "i = `expr $i + 1`"). So I don't know what the best is. But I bet that these should be right: - GRUB should not distinguish command execution from scripting. - The language must not enforce users to learn really new things. - The language should be flexible enough to do many things without writing modules in C. The first item is a must for GRUB, because the strongest advantage in GRUB is that you can do whatever at run time. Once we accept that scripting can do more than from the command line, we would lose complete control of booting process. I think the first one suggests that we should not have multiple languages. There is a way to have multiple ones without breaking that policy (i.e. embedding a language in another language), but this sounds overkill to me. So a scripting language should fit into the semantics of the command-line interface. For example, Lisp is not acceptable, because it is too difficult to use as a shell. I don't know if PHP-like syntax fulfills this requirement, but I don't like it very much, because PHP is really similar to Perl (which is known as a maker of write-only code). I'd like to hear others' opinions. I have been thinking this issue for some years, but I still don't know a good answer. Okuji