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

[Akim Demaille]

>>>>> "Alexandre" == Alexandre Oliva <address@hidden> writes:

>> But again, Autoconf is addressing portability issues on the user
>> side, not on the maintainer side.

Alexandre> Why not address them on the maintainer side too?  Why not
Alexandre> have our own dog food? :-)

Alexandre> AC_PLAIN_SCRIPT (or however it's spelled these days :-)
Alexandre> rules!

Alexandre, you are amongst the people who best know what I'm talking
about.

We are about to write new tools, typically autom4te, on top of which
autoheader, autoconf etc. will be rewritten.  I'm fed up with
addressing portability issues on the maintainer side.  It's slows down
the development process, makes it riskier for free (having portability
bugs in *.m4 is enough of a problem), and requires a very slow
learning curve for future maintainers and/or contributors (you don't
become a portability guru in just snapping the fingers: you must
know.  With Perl you can _test_ on your architecture).

Switching to Perl (end of the debate, that's the only serious
alternative) brings positive answers to all of the problems.