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

[Charles Lepple <clepple@ghz.cc>]

On Monday, October 27, 2003, at 05:43 PM, Dan McMahill wrote:

> I'd probably vote for scheme.  For those of use who use cadence, scheme
> isn't too bad.  Also for anyone hacks on gnetlist, they're already
> exposed to guile and TCL may be yet another thing to learn.
funny, I was just going to say the opposite... I would be willing to 
relearn TCL to get away from guile :-)

Joking aside-- the useful subset of guile needed to muck around with 
gnetlist would be much easier to learn if there were a simple way to 
debug your code. I tend to run away from any interpreter which doesn't 
have an interactive mode, because IMNSHO one of the main reasons for an 
interpreted language is to get away from the compile-crash-burn cycle.

This is one of the main reasons why I do a lot of netlist/BOM stuff in 
Perl-- I can look at any variable that I need to, and see where the 
problem lies without resorting to debug statements in the code. With 
the tab-completion available in the latest perl debuggers, I feel twice 
as productive :-)

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that with even a bare-bones 
interpreter mode for gnetlist (print variables, evaluate expressions), 
a fair number of people would be more willing to put aside their 
language preferences long enough to give guile a try.

--
Charles Lepple
clepple@ghz.cc