Re: Languages (was Re: Forms support in clients)

Rick Troth (TROTH@UA1VM.UA.EDU)
Wed, 28 Sep 94 18:48:15 CDT


> For example, I could put up a Perl script to do the
>Xerox map generator, the mime type of which would be
>
>application/perl

Fine.

>and that type is mapped to
>
>application/perl; safecsh perl

Not fine.

>I guess this is similar in a way to Vinay's vsafecsh, at
>
>http://www.eit.com/software/vsafecsh/vsafecsh.html

My first impression with Vinay's work here is that it's
completely UNIX-centric. We really must avoid that. I mean,
if you want to perform prototyping and must have some platform
dependencies for a short time, okay, but keep an eye on the
long term platform independent goal.

UNIX can run shells and will be happy with that syntax.
OS/2 and NT will probably swallow it. DOS or VM/CMS or VAX/VMS might
tolerateit. But I doubt a Macintosh will be at all happy with it.
It any case, it will require too many shims on the platforms to which
it isn't native.

> ... - many scripting languages have
>been ported to every major platform. And for the non-faint-of-heart,
>compiled languages could work similarly - downloading a C program, having
>it compiled, and starting it all with one click of a button would be just
>too cool.

Personally, I like it. But you're right: it's for the
non-faint-of-heart. And yes, the scripting languages are becoming
reliably ubiquitous. But you had explicit shell syntax in your
example above, which concerns me.

> Brian

--
Rick Troth, <rmtroth@aol.com>, <troth@ua1vm.ua.edu>, Houston, Texas, USA