Jim Meyering <j...@meyering.net> writes: > So I conclude that the choices are > > Perl > Python > Ruby > > If using Perl, we could easily restrict ourselves to > features of 5.8 or even older. With Python and especially Ruby, > I'd advocate requiring much more recent versions, due to their relative > immaturity.
My preference would be perl, but only because the other alternatives appears to have more serious problems: any typically non-interpreted language (i.e., C/C++/Java) is difficult to run on many platforms without additional tools. I've had significant problems deploying two different Ruby applications on the same system (both Ruby applications wanted to modify system Ruby files which is unacceptable). Python may be a good candidate, but given that automake already requires Perl, the pains with perl doesn't outweigh the disadvantage with another pre-dependency, and personally my perl knowledge is better than my python knowledge. I've had problems with forward compatibility of perl between versions, and in libidn I've given up on making the perl script work with all perl releases so I have run the perl script once and then stored the generated files in Git. However, problems like that can be debugged and fixed, so I don't think it is a complete show-stopper. /Simon
