🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1410026@hpcvca.CV.HP.COM> charles@hpcvca.CV.HP.COM (Charles Brown) writes:
<> 				All scripting languages worth their salt
<> have some sort of comment syntax. So, make some unique pattern that can be
<> used to identify a script language, and allow it anywhere in the first couple
<> of lines of the script (in the first couple of lines to allow for programs
<> that use a seperate line to indicate a comment pseudo-op, or need some magic
<> on line 1):
<
<Oh joy!  A breath of fresh air!  This proposal takes the desirable
<part of what was proposed earlier while nicely avoiding the pitfalls.

Like most simple solutions to complex problems, this one doesn't work.

First problem: Line? What's a line in a binary file? I really don't
want the system looking through 300K or so of a databse for a newline
character that isn't in it. This actually has an easy solution:
instead of limiting it to the first couple of lines, limit it to the
first N bytes, for reasonable N - the first block sounds good.

Second problem: The string needs to be something that isn't likely to
appear in a binary file - or an arbitrary text file - by chance. Once
again, the solution is simple.

Third problem: This is ugly. The real BSD solution is clean, simple,
and fit well with the existing system on Unix. This doesn't fit well
with what's already on the Amiga (though the Unix solution would).

Fourth problem: Having Execute feed an ARexx script to ARexx cuts off
the major part of ARexx's usefullness as a scripting language.

One more time: Unix doesn't have a mechanism similar to ARexx.
Adopting the BSD solution to the problem of multiple scripting
languages doesn't solve any existing problems - you still have to have
two seperate mechanisms, one for ARexx and one for everything else. In
this case, "everything else" is only one thing. So why bother?
Especially when ARexx _already has_ a mechanism allowing for multiple
scripting languages.

	<mike


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