"Eric S. Raymond" <esr@thyrsus.com> said:
> I hate to ruin a nice juicy flamewar by introducing such dull things as
> facts into it, but...
Nice computation, very informative. But you leave out a couple of facts:
- Some people (count me in) have only ever used "make xconfig" to see how
it looks. "make oldconfig" and a very occasional "make menuconfig" are
what I use. Subtract Tk and all that grott for many people.
- I don't care for Python, have never even looked closely at a program
written in the language. I just don't want to be forced to learn
another language to be able to care for thne kernel building machinery.
Sure, the second point is weak, but I've had to fix minor problems with it
now and then.
Besides, you state a "compression ratio" of 9 from C to Phyton would
justify using C, and call that unlikely. It is my experience (fooling
around with very many languages) that idiomatic code in any two very
different languages looks very different, and uses wildly different ways of
doing things, so saying that 1 line of Python > 9 lines of C is true for
many particular lines (as it probably is the other way around for selected
cases!), but it could very well be more like 1 line Python ~ 1 line C or
perhaps another smallish ratio for a whole application.
Prototype in Python; once the design is set, redo in C + lex + yacc. The
lexer and parser should very rarely change after the first few rounds, so
people can build their kernels using (smallish) generated C files, and can
dispense of flex + bison. This tilts the numbers in favor of C...
-- Horst von Brand vonbrand@sleipnir.valparaiso.cl Casilla 9G, Viņa del Mar, Chile +56 32 672616- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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