Marc Weber wrote: > Excerpts from Ben Franksen's message of Mon Apr 23 10:53:26 +0200 2012: >> Would it be sensible or even possible to factor out the configuration >> language from the nix package and distribute it separately? > Such things are always possible. I think you should talk about your use > case first.
Large control systems: many devices (hundreds, thousands), most of them quite similar to each other, but now and then the occasional exception to the rule. A few devices very complex, needing hierarchies of configuration data. > Eventually using another lazy language such as Haskell get's > your job done as well. I love programming in Haskell, but it is too large and complex for use as a configuration language. It also too hard to understand for the typical control system engineer. > That's why you should be aware about why the nix > language is the tool of choice for you Well, I see nix (the language) as something like yaml or json (only smaller and cleaner) with the additional feature of user-defined functions (and some built-in ones). Nix has a number of features that make it especially suitable for configuration (no wonder: it's what it has been designed for), for instance the inherit feature which makes it easy to define exceptions to a general rule. > Writing a DSL for configurations can be done easily using many scripting > languages - thus you should be aware why you like nix that much. Mostly it's the purity and laziness that make it IMO superior to the standard scripting languages. We have been using perl, python, tcl, but none of them are as suited to the task as I think the nix language would be. > For prototyping you can use nix and make it create arbitrary > configuration files. I don't know how I can execute a 'nix-language script'. Is there a tool in the nix package that I could use for that? I would not want to fork the configuration language from nix, but rather factor the language out, so users who only need/want the language can still profit from improvements made by the nix development. Do you think it would be very difficult to extract the language from the nix source tree? Cheers Ben _______________________________________________ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev