Re: Lua as a config-file language [was Re: proplib and the jet age]

[uwe%stderr.spb.ru@localhost (Valeriy E. Ushakov)]

David Holland <dholland-tech%netbsd.org@localhost> wrote:

> There is also a problem with Turing-complete configuration when one
> starts trying to provide desktop (or tablet/phone) software with
> Control Panels and Preferences and so on, which is that it can't be
> adequately represented in that context. [...]

Exactly.

Somewhat on a tangent, but this immediately makes me think of
PostScript (fully blown programming language) vs. PDF (same graphic
model but not "programmable").

It might be tempting to go forward with this analogy and suggest a
distiller-like facility for config files (distiller is a program, a PS
interpreter, effectively, that takes PostScript code and "distills" it
into PDF), but then of course it's easier to just be general about it
and let config files be generated by whatever is convenient.  It may
be a shell script that dynamically creates an awk script to produce a
sed script to convert some other data into the required config file;
it may be a Lua script; or it may be a Control Panel widget.

-uwe