Re: GDB and scripting languages - which

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2007 10:56:20 -0500
> From: Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@false.org>
> Cc: Jim Blandy <jimb@codesourcery.com>, gdb@sourceware.org
> 
> On Wed, Feb 14, 2007 at 05:41:06PM +0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > > Even if the exception issue is worked out, though, I'm still concerned
> > > that Lua doesn't have as much momentum as Python.  Python's wealth of
> > > other libraries available (gui; graphing; networking) brings a lot of
> > > potential with it.  And there are a lot of programmers out there who
> > > could just start scripting GDB the day Python support is committed.
> > 
> > Python is a full-fledged programming language, not a language created
> > for extending other programs.  Do you really think we need networking,
> > graphics, and GUI in GDB scripts?  That sounds like an awful overhead.
> 
> None of that's in the core of Python, you'll notice.  It's all in
> modules.  Some of those for networking are standard modules, but none
> of it would be linked in to GDB.

I only talked about them because Jim did, and I assumed that he
mentioned those because he thought it was important to have them in
GDB.

> But in any case those aren't the
> ones I had in mind: I was thinking of things like XML, text
> processing, and high-performance numerics.

More details would help make this discussion more constructive.  How
``high-performance'' should our numerics be, and why?  Do you have any
quantitative criteria?

As for text processing, what features do you think we need,
specifically?

> Based on this discussion, I think we probably won't convince you that
> Python is the best choice.

Why do you think so?  I certainly didn't dismiss anyone's arguments as
easily as others dismiss mine.  The only real argument in favor of
Python that I heard was that it's widely used and known.  That's not a
lot to become convinced, since what I'm suggesting is not some unknown
language either, or something invented just now.

> Do you think that Python would be a bad choice with serious negative
> consequences?

Python is an excellent language, so choosing it cannot possibly be bad
or have serious negative consequences.