[Asterisk-Dev] Wish List / Brain Storm from AstriCon

[David Pollak]

Guys,

For you Apple ][ Integer Basic users from the way-back machine: we 
didn't have line renumbering or debugging either, but we seemed to be 
able to write code.  It's possible, just not fun.

At the end of the day, Dial Plan is a Turing complete language.  It's 
got a horrible syntax, horrible debugging features, and it's slow as 
frozen dog poop (try running a dial plan with 100,000 lines), but it's a 
language just like BASIC, Pascal, C, etc.  IMHO, continuing to evolve 
Dial Plan as a language should be a wicked low priority -- 
extensions.conf should be kept around for legacy purposes, but nothing 
more.  Integrating a better command/event mechanism that allows for 
languages of choice is the better choice. (See my other post)

Thanks,

David

Benjamin on Asterisk Mailing Lists wrote:

>On Wed, 29 Sep 2004 15:55:56 +0200, Holger Schurig
><hs4233 at mail.mn-solutions.de> wrote:
>  
>
>>Based on this thinking we would still write code in old BASIC:
>>
>>10 FOR I = 1 TO 10
>>20 PRINT "HELLO"
>>30 NEXT I
>>
>>But somehow we have now languages without line numbers and we love them
>>all.
>>    
>>
>
>I agree, but the trouble is that people are very religious about their
>choice of language and I guess Mark is concerned about not letting the
>all too often occuring religious fights over languages be carried into
>Asterisk. We are all old enough to realise already that no matter what
>language you were to implement for dialplan scripting, there will
>always be some folks who want it different. You can't really be
>everything to everybody. I think Mark is doing the right thing trying
>to avoid this.
>
>Having said that, I'd like to emphasise that I am not saying we
>shouldn't aim to get something better. However, I don't think the
>solution is to modify the existing scripting engine.
>
>Let that whachamacallit? BASTIC ?! stay as it is, perhaps a few minor
>improvements here and there, but basically leave it alone.
>
>Instead, we should be using the energy we are otherwise likely to
>waste on fighting over enhancing BASTIC with syntactic sugar and put
>it to work towards a low level layer into which multiple concurrent
>scripting engines can be plugged in. This could be in the form of a
>common byte code or it could be a Scripting Language API, something
>along those lines.
>
>In any event, it should be an architecture that allows multiple
>scripting languages to be used for dialplan scripting without those
>languages having to be translated into each other or otherwise being
>aware of each other.
>
>Then every camp can build their own engine and use whatever language
>they fancy. The Perl afficionados will make a Perlsterisk language,
>you and me, we'd be looking forward to Asterython and others migh use
>Pastal, JastaScript, Lispast or Schastme, Tastl/Tk or Bastsh or
>whatever. The ones who use BASTIC will be ridiculed and the ones
>trying to implement C* and .AST will be banned from the list.
>Everybody will be happy ;-)
>
>The only controversial side effect would be that posting dialplan
>excerpts on the mailing list for asking questions when getting stuck
>will become a bit more -- shall we say -- exciting ?!
>
>rgds
>benjk
>
>  
>
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