The new logging facility is very cool, but I think it's missing a great
opportunity: if ever there was a perfect use case for S-expressions,
it's logs. They're extremely human readable (esp. to Schemers), and
extremely manipulable programmatically.
In my experience, when you add logging to an app you discover two needs,
in this order:
1. the need to generate logging info conveniently
2. the need to manipulate existing logs and mine them for data
Strings are pretty good for #1, but they're pretty bad for #2.
S-expressions are great at both.
The `log-message' procedure (etc.) would need to be generalized from
taking a string to taking an S-expression, but this would require one
backwards-incompatible change: the system would have to `write' the
data, not `display' it. Otherwise you'd get entries like
(foo #t 42 don't tell anyone. hello, world)
Logging is still a pretty new feature, so I bet it's not too late to
make this change. Opinions?
Dave
_________________________________________________
For list-related administrative tasks:
http://list.cs.brown.edu/mailman/listinfo/plt-dev
