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From: Bruce Stephens [SMTP:b.stephens@isode.com] Jim Blandy <jimb@red-bean.com> writes: > > For a practical scripting language, you don't need "best". > > Okay, this is not so cool. I don't see any reason to embrace sloppy > interfaces, just because we're an interpreter. Sometimes people do > want to get something exactly right, even in scripts. I'm not saying you shouldn't go for "good", or even "as good as you can make it", but from a practical engineering viewpoint, "now" is of value, especially when accompanied by "pretty good", and "useful". I need to disagree a little with you here. From a "practical engineering viewpoint", there is no need to use Guile. I would rather Guile took another 2 years to establish interfaces to databases than that it simply rush out a clone of some other language's interface. It is worth considering what everyone else has done, but it is also important to remember that this is Scheme.. a much more powerful language than most of the others, and entirely novel solutions are possible. But basically we all agree, I think. The DBI people have been thinking about this for a while, and they have something which they feel works, so it makes lots of sense to look at that before starting to think from scratch. As far as "things to consider".. I myself have written (and discarded) a SQL query engine in Perl, and a tiny SQL subset implementation in Guile (not discarded). There are many things about SQL which can be simplified and elegantly represented in languages which support closures. I am busy at the moment, but when I get a chance I can collect this code and make it available to anyone who is interested. Another thing to consider for those who have not seen it is the database interface present in MetaHTML. It contains two main interfaces, one for a DBM style database, and one for SQL style databases. For those who have not seen it, MetaHTML is very Scheme-like. -- John Redford AKA GArrow