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From: davis@ilog.fr (Harley Davis)
Subject: Re: Removing READ
In-Reply-To: qobi@qobi.ai's message of 24 Feb 95 00:58:33 GMT
Message-ID: <DAVIS.95Feb27185445@passy.ilog.fr>
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References: <hbaker-2202951004460001@192.0.2.1> <23Feb1995.012935.Alan@LCS.MIT.EDU>
	<QOBI.95Feb23195827@qobi.ai>
Date: 27 Feb 1995 17:54:45 GMT


In article <QOBI.95Feb23195827@qobi.ai> qobi@qobi.ai (Jeffrey Mark Siskind) writes:

   In article <23Feb1995.012935.Alan@LCS.MIT.EDU> Alan@lcs.mit.EDU (Alan Bawden) writes:

	 ...  The world would be dramatically improved if nearly
	 _all_ programs parsed s-expressions for '.xxxrc' programs instead of
	 re-inventing the parsing/language wheel for every single init file.

      What!!!  You speak heresy!  Unix weenies take great pride in
      remembering all the quirks of all those little languages.  You
      probably think it would be good if they all used the same
      commenting convention, or used the same mechanism for
      continuation lines, or for quoting a newline, or for specifying
      a string value that starts with a space.  If they all had the
      same syntax then I could write an Emacs mode that knew how to
      edit them all.  That would be terrible!  Heck, if they had the
      same syntax, people might even be tempted to put all that
      information in -one- file.  What a disaster!

      What a bogus idea.  You Scheme losers will never learn.  All that
      convenience might -hurt- someone.

   OK. Here is a nice undergraduate project. Someone should rationally
   design a single S-Expression base for all of the Unix .xxxrc
   files. At the same time there should be the ability for one file to
   contain all of the information.  Then that person should write a
   Scheme program for generating all of the .xxxrc file from the
   S-Expression base. Then one can create a crontab demon to run this
   program every so often.

Wouldn't it be weird if Common Lisp or Emacs users had to code their
init files in Scheme?  What about CenterLine?

-- Harley Davis
-- 

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