[Snow-users-list] high-priority snow packages and package naming

Thomas Lord lord at emf.net
Fri Sep 14 18:19:47 EDT 2007


Julian Graham wrote:
> Hi Tom,
>
>  I'm confused -- I think Snow already "supports" SCSH, platform-wise.
> Unless you mean that SCSH's abstractions for processes and other shell
> objects should be separated out packaged? That reminds me, though --
> what about a common interface for doing FFI stuff?  That'd let us add
> bindings for any number of other languages / libraries (Snow support
> for GLib, anyone?)
>   


I meant that SCSH should be factored out and the best practical
approximation of a portable implementation be provided.

One strategy for a portable implementation might be to treat
subprocesses and/or network connections as the ultimate primitive,
and then to write a little portable (to unix-like systems) server
than can execute simplified SCSH "process forms".   I'm not
sure it's worth the bother, though:  SCSH requires a few
system calls but that's essentially all it really requires.





>  But, yeah -- SREs!  Shamefully enough, I wasn't aware of Olin
> Shivers' spec (http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/shivers/papers/sre.txt)
> until just now.  I really like the syntax, but it seems like he
> intended SREs to be used in conjunction with a Scheme platform's
> (e.g., SCSH) native regexp implementation / API... which sort of
> leaves us where we were.  Any thoughts on Dorai Sitaram's portable
> regexp implementation
> (http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/dorai/pregexp/pregexp.html)?
> - Hide quoted text -
>   

It will be too slow to be of much use on most implementations.
Perhaps it has utility as a reference implementation.

The most practical thing for Snow would be to mostly avoid
stacking up dependencies on the details of regexps and to
make sure that systems that natively offer Posix or Perl
regexps can take advantage of that.   Sad but true.


-t


>
> On 9/14/07, Thomas Lord <lord at emf.net> wrote:
>   
>> Julian Graham wrote:
>>     
>>> Hi Schemers and Snow maintainers,
>>>
>>>   I'm curious as to whether there are any particular modules /
>>> functionality people really want to see ported to Snow.  (I believe
>>> Kirill Lisovsky is working on getting SSAX packaged up.)  How about a
>>> common API for regular expressions?  SRFIs?  (If so, any in
>>> particular?)
>>>
>>>       
>> A probably crazy and too ambitious idea:  SCSH (and SREs).
>>
>> Those would be very good for duct-taping together systems that
>> mix Scheme programs with other kinds of program in typical host
>> environments.
>>
>> -t
>>
>>
>>     
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