Language design (was Re: sort a foreach on a stat value?)

[Frank Ch. Eigler]

hunt wrote:

> [...] Is is too late to try to make the language small, easy to use,
> efficient [...]

Such pleasant-sounding directives don't by themselves advance debate.
Like apple pie and fatherhood, everyone wants those things.  They help
contrast individual proposals, but that's what we've been doing.  If
you have other ideas, that's great, bring them on.  Even better if
they consider broader system issues rather than just language syntax.

> If you really want really fancy post-processing, instead of beefing
> up our language, a far better solution would be to pipe the through
> a different interpreter, like perl.

While that opinion is embodied by dtrace, I suspect you will find not
everyone is quite so enthused about the requirement to write
nontrivial analysis scripts in *two* languages.  You will also find
that there is no obligation to use the foreach/if/for control
constructs to richly process one's data.  For those wishing to do it
like dtrace, what obstacles do you believe we interpose?


- FChE