Re: What is an extension language (was Re: need example code)

[Jay Glascoe <jglascoe@...>]

On Thu, 21 Jan 1999, Bennett Todd wrote:

> [ warning: this is a wandering bunch of musings on programming language style
>   and ways of using languages, not a whole lot of meat here ]
> 

no problem, I read it all.

> For lots of kinds of programming, Perl is my favourite language; I find I can
> express myself with less strain and feeling of constraint in that language;
> the many different idioms make for fluid expression --- for me. And in the

yeah, I know what you mean.  I can see myself using both Perl and
Python for a long time to come.  Text munging, shortish scripts (okay
if they grow ~1k lines) and such for Perl, compute intensive stuff for
Python/C.  I just gave up on Perl as an extension language because IMO
the Perl/C API is too bizarre.

> Doing the entirity of such a thing in C would be a drag and a hassle; once you
> get used to nice garbage-collected languages with O-O features and useable
> strings and so on, it really sucks to go back. But doing the

right.  If you can believe it, I learned C for the sole purpose of
writing C extensions.  I mean, I had Mark Lutz's book and couldn't
make sense out of the extending/embedding stuff.  So I learnt C.

> Until I met Lua I was leaning towards Scheme for this sort o' role, but
> always ran into a couple of barriers: first, while Scheme is so elegant in
> theory it's scary, actually looking at code makes my eyeballs ache. A bowl of
> fingernail parings.

have you taken a look at Guile yet?  It's still a few years away from
being a serious contender in the extension/embedding language field,
but I really like it.  The Guile/C API is very clean.

> -Bennett
> 

	Jay Glascoe
	jglascoe@jay.giss.nasa.gov
	www.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/csci/change.pl

-- 
echo '
Goldfish will grow to fit the size of their aquaria.
small aquarium => small goldfish
large aquarium => large goldfish
' | perl -ne '
	s/goldfish/personal expenditures/gi;
	s/aquari(a|um)/income/g;
	print;
'