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List:       ant-dev
Subject:    Re: What flavour of scripting?
From:       William Uther <will+ant () cs ! cmu ! edu>
Date:       2000-02-29 21:20:46
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-- Jose Alberto Fernandez <jofernan@us.oracle.com> wrote:
> rubys@us.ibm.com wrote:
>> Recap of my thoughts on the subject so far: I believe that conditional
>> processing and iteration are valid requirements.  This, however, does not
>> mean that I believe that they should be implemented as tasks.  Wildcards,
>> recursion, and if/unless attributes are all valid ways of addressing
>> these needs.
> 
> There are two alternatives for this kind of thing:
> (1) Make them tasks, which means allow enough liberty of the xml
> framework to allow them to be defined. E.g., properties could be passed
>      as arguments, a way to
>      have substaks, etc.
>
> (2) Make this things parts of the Ant's concepts. Just like <taskdef ...>
> or <project ...>
>      so they are predefine with a very restricted capability and that is
>      all what one has.

It is possible to have intermediate solutions between these two
alternatives.  Technically, you go with alternative 1.  You then only
accept a few standard logic-tasks into the ant core and tell other people
to make their own task.  This would probably have a neater implementation
than working with (2).

> rubys@us.ibm.com wrote:
>> In fact, I'm mildly against having a <foreach> task as it forces is to
>> examine the shortcomings of the existing tasks.

I must admit I find this statement disturbing.

"We can't look over there!  We might find out that things are broken!"

I'd much rather look the broken bits in the face and choose not to fix them
for some reason (or put them at low priority on a ToDo list) than just not
look at them.

> I like the idea of allowing other languages besides Java. It opens things
> up. I do not think we should treat scripting languages in any special
> way. For that I propose just extend <taskdef ...> to allow for other
> languajes.

Hmm.  I see two problems with this:

  (1) You lose the ability to easily place Ant tasks in the scripts.
  (2) You make any language easily usable and so require the reader to
learn whatever the pet language of the writer was.  This is going to break
portability, both in terms of having runtimes for these scripting languages
and in terms of readability.

later,  (Or, given the current rate of flow on this list, sooner... :)

\x/ill          :-}

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