[asterisk-users] LCR in Asterisk

[Tilghman Lesher]

On Sunday 17 February 2008 10:33:18 John wrote:
> On Feb 13, 2008 12:33 PM, Tilghman Lesher
>
> <tilghman at mail.jeffandtilghman.com> wrote:
> > In the same way that a PHP programmer should not attempt write Python the
> > way she writes PHP, I would agree with you.  However, if you're willing
> > to adapt to the ways the dialplan works, you can create dialplans which
> > aren't obfuscated at all.  Tcl and Lisp are close cousins to the dialplan
> > in terms of how they do things.  Not everybody is a Lisp programmer, and
> > some people absolutely detest it.  That doesn't make it any less of a
> > good language.
>
> Having done significant work in Tcl,  and very interested in this LCR
> debate, can you shed light on the similarities between Tcl and the
> dial plan?   Thx!

I'd say the most striking resemblance between the two involves the use
of components, which Osterhout describes in his 1994 book on the Tcl/Tk
environment.  Rather than creating a singular monolithic language which
is able to do everything, the dialplan relies in great part on the ability to
add new components, whether they be dialplan applications or dialplan
functions, to supplement various tasks.  These components act in a
cooperative fashion for whatever the pbx administrator needs to do.

-- 
Tilghman