Re: documentation of interest

[Ben Pfaff]

John Darrington <address@hidden> writes:

> On Mon, Mar 20, 2006 at 04:03:40PM -0800, Ben Pfaff wrote:
>                Production Language.  This describes a simple but
>                powerful language for graphing.  I bet that we'll want
>                to implement this at some point--it would make a nice
>                backing for a GUI for graphs--although it would be a
>                big project too.
>
> I saw this, but haven't looked at it.  I thought the acronym was
> chosen rather gratuitously.

I doubt there was anything intentional about it.  There's a very
large proprietary software industry out there in which most
people haven't ever heard of GNU or the GPL, believe it or not.
In fact, I have a "GNU" baseball cap and an "EFF" baseball cap
that I used to wear around Stanford's computer science building,
and even here I would get an occasional question about what they
meant.

>              * The Tables reference guide.  This describes the GUI
>                behind the CTABLES command syntax.  I've been wrestling
>                with how to deal with table output for a while now
>                (well, *years*), and this might be nice to look at
>                while thinking about that.
>
> Another interesting feature they've come up with recently is a
> programmin API using Python.  I thought this might be worth looking
> at, but if we choose to implement it, then I think we should also do
> bindings for guile and perl.

I've started to wonder about that kind of thing too.  I don't
think we're ready for anything like that yet, but we're getting
closer.  The code is getting cleaner all the time.
-- 
"Unix... is not so much a product
 as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history
 of the hacker subculture."
--Neal Stephenson