Matt Benson wrote:
NOW, having said all that, I am a DSL-phile and am
having all sorts of fun writing various
domain-specific languages for the last couple of
years. I have a low-priority intent to develop a
custom language for Ant and will attempt, when I am
ready to begin, to do so as an officially sanctioned
antlib, assuming I can muster the required community
support. If not, I'll do it somewhere else. This is
a goal I have nurtured for quite some time, and as I
have been building experience in the DSL arena, I feel
I am nearly ready--the biggest hurdle will be the
specification of a sensible syntax that will
functionally work as XML does for Ant--namely by being
open-ended, while eliminating useless noise.
So drool. ;)
Well, that I wait to see.
As I said before, SmartFrog support ant, and SmartFrog is significantly
less procedural than Ant is; ant has an implicit sequential execution
model, whereas smartfrog deploys things in parallel by default, with
liveness checks on deployed things until they are told to terminate and
clean up.
One problem I have with any DSL language (and that includes smartfrog)
is remembering all the rules about whether to use colon or equals for
assigment, whether you should terminate lines with semicolons or not,
whether lists are allowed a trailing , at the end ["like","this",], what
the unicode story is (or whether it just uses the local encoding), how
to escape stuff, etc. All the little details that XML hands for you.
For all its ugliness (and if you think XML is bad, look at RDF-in-XML),
it at least gets some things right
-tool neutral (though the way ant abuses XMLNS blurs this)
-good internationalization
-not as terse as perl
Anyway, I will await your prototype
-steve
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