Re: gEDA-user: Gdatabase and datadraw available for download

[Ales Hvezda <ahvezda@seul.org>]

Hi All,


[snip]
>I am personally agnostic 'cause I've programmed in both languages.
>However, I have a few comments to make, followed by a question.

Before this degenerates into a holy flame war of scripting languages,
(oops too late :-), let me add my two cents also based on my experience
with these two scripting languages:

TCL
---

Pros:  
	* Known by many many people.
	* Used within the EDA community.
	* Supported on Linux/Unix, MacOS, and Win32 (even MinGW).
	* Language well documented and how to embed a interpret is also well
	  documented.  Many books on TCL/TK.
	* Interpreters are encapsulated (you can have multiple interpreters
	  in a single process with minimal fuss).
	* Easy access to TK.

Cons:
	* The language syntax/functions never found a home in my head.
	* I've written a few apps in TCL/TK and I always had to write
	  what seemed like a lot of code to get the simplest things done.
	  Certainly the necessary code for a particular task is less
	  than the comperable code in C, but more than say perl.  IMHO.
	  Perhaps this is better nowadays and might be due to my
	  inexperience with TCL.
	* ... more I'm sure, depending on your POV.

scheme (All of this is based around my experience with guile)
------

Pros:
	* Lists are very natural match for netlist processing.
	* guile provides a rich set of functions.
	* I only had to write one or two gnetlist backends, the 24 
	  additional backends were written by others. :)
	* Easy to provide scheme interfaces to C functions.

Cons:
	* guile takes over your program.  I don't care for this much.
	* I haven't found a way (or looked very hard) to have multiple guile
	  interpreters running in a single process.
	* guile development is centered around Linux/Unix.  Great for
	  Linux/Unix, but not so great for MinGW (which requires jumping
	  through some hoops to get compiling).
	* The parts of the API will be deprecated soon.  I will have to
	  do extra work to support newer releases of guile.
	* scheme isn't exactly a mainstream language.
	* People seem to fear ((((()))))'s.  :)

Having just said all this, I like guile quite a bit.  I haven't found a
suitable replacement.  I even like TCL.  However I will examine all of
my choices when I start a new project.
								-Ales