Re: Perl vs Scheme vs ML vs ... for autoconf

[Russ Allbery]

Paul Eggert <address@hidden> writes:

> Certainly Perl could be used, but for this application it would almost
> certainly be less readable and maintainable than Scheme would be,
> assuming similar competence levels for Perl and for Scheme.

I adore Perl and use it constantly for all sorts of things and still think
that you may well be correct on this.  I badly need to learn more Scheme.

> ML and Haskell might be even better choices than Scheme, but they are
> less well known and used, and might not be worth the trouble.

After having just installed SML/NJ on seven platforms, I can assure you
that if you require ML as a prerequisite for using autoconf, people will
completely freak.  :)  SML/NJ isn't *hard* to build, per-se, but it looks
absolutely nothing at all like you're average software package.

Objective Caml is closer, but at this point we're straying into pretty odd
territory and languages that most people don't understand and have never
used.

-- 
Russ Allbery (address@hidden)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>