Another scripting language implemented into Python itself?

[Roy Smith]

"Carl Banks" <invalidemail at aerojockey.com> wrote:

> > Imbed
> EMBED.

My apologies for being sloppy.  And with an initial capital, so it just 
jumps off the page at you :-)
 
> > Python, or Perl, or TCL, or Ruby, or PHP,
> 
> Not PHP.  PHP is one of the better (meaning less terrible) examples of
> what happens when you do this sort of thing, which is not saying a lot.

But, that's exactly my point.  To be honest, I've never used PHP.  But 
however bad it may be, at least it's got a few years of people fixing 
bugs, writing books, writing add-on tools, etc, behind it.  Better to 
use somebody else's well-known and well-supported mess of a scripting 
language than to invest several person-years inventing your own mess 
that's no better.

There are a lot of existing scripting languages to pick from.  It's nice 
to pick the best one, but even if you pick the worst, that's probably 
better than you can do on your own.
 
> TCL isn't that great in this regard, either, as it makes a lot of
> common operations that ought to be very simple terribly unweildy.

In my last job, I did a lot of TCL.  I've posted on this before (when I 
was at a previous employer), so I'll just provide a pointer 
(http://tinyurl.com/44w6n).  That article says most of what that needs 
saying, *AND* proves that I really do know how to spell embed :-)

It might be worth adding, however, that the TCL implementation discussed 
above was a 3rd generation for that product.  Generation #1 was a bunch 
of shell scripts.  Generation #2 was a home-grown scripting language.  
Fortunately, they learned their lesson soon enough to rescue the project 
with a conversion to TCL.  I'm not sure how many person-years were 
wasted both in the initial implementation and in the conversion effort, 
but I imagine it was a $500,000 mistake.