[Monotone-devel] Concern about LUA & suggestions for command line output

[Joel Crisp]

Hi Guys

Saw a message a few back about writing output formatters in LUA - the 
place I'm currently working at is balking at Clearcase triggers in perl 
since they can't get anyone with perl experience (!), and I've never 
personally even met _anyone_ with LUA experience.

Whilst LUA is a fine language and rapidly gaining acceptance in the 
gaming world, I'd like to propose an alternate scripting API using (sic) 
that PITA of a language Javascript, for the simple reasons that any web 
programmer is going to know it, and also that the wscript scripting host 
which ships with windows XP+ supports it; these two factors are likely 
to make it more acceptable to the pointy haired ones despite it being a 
complete dogs dinner of a language (although it does at least have some 
reasonable regexp support). There are decent implementations (C, Java) 
from Mozilla.

BTW, all Clearcase 'ls' type commands support the -fmt option which 
provides a simple printf type syntax for custom formatting (e.g. 
cleartool describe -fmt "%On" <file> prints just the oid of the file, or 
cleartool lstream -fmt "%[activities]Np\n" <stream> lists activities on 
a stream) - its suprisingly powerful for such a simple concept. and 
doesn't require any scripting, but is very useful for generating 
information for shell scripts, or to generate batch files as you can put 
literals in the format string like commands or newlines.

Joel


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