Re: Documentation proposal

["Greg J. Badros" <gjb at cs dot washington dot edu>]

Maciej Stachowiak <mstachow@alum.mit.edu> writes:

> > Michael Livshin <mlivshin@bigfoot.com> writes:
> >
> > > "Harvey J. Stein" <hjstein@bfr.co.il> writes:
> > >
> > > > I'd probably do it if I felt there was general interest, but I don't
> > > > think there is...
> > >
> > > you mean we are happy to have a Perl script extract Guile's core docs?
> > > sacrilege!
> > >
> > > is the speed difference *that* bad?
> >
> > Factor of 20 at least, IIRC.
> >
> > I'm a believer in using the right language for the right task;  Scheme
> > isn't always the right language (I know, that's sacrilege, too!) and
> > for text munging I prefer Perl.
> 
> I hate to make decisions for political instead of technical reasons, but
> Guile
> is at least partly a political project, so I don't think it would be
> appropriate to
> make Perl a required part of the Guile build process. It may be a better
> tool
> right now but we're never going to convince people Guile is good for
> anything
> if we use Perl ourselves for such a critical task.

And I think that may be the right thing to do in the long term.  In the
short term, I favor function over politics so I'm gonna make it fly and
get it stable and documented before worrying about this issue (and
probably leave it to the politicians to re-code in guile).

Greg