Re: choice of implementation language

[Pádraig Brady]

So gnulib-tool is a 4500 line shell script which you would
like to re-implement to ease maintenance, with the side benefit
of possibly being a bit faster? If performance was the main
reason it would probably be quicker to hack on bash a bit
to speed it up.

If you really want to re-implement it, then for the problem
domain I would suggest a scripting language.

You mention python has backwards compatability issues.
I wrote a large enough python program against V1.52,
which only needed 1 trivial tweak to be compatible with 2.x
That's 8 years or so now of compatability.

I've just started with perl myself (and compared to python
I hate it :)), but given that the autoconf etc. are written in perl
I would think it's the best choice?

cheers,
Pádraig.