looking for interpreter / macro language facility

[Alex Martelli]

ajb at miles.WPI.EDU (Arthur J. Butler) writes:
:hi.  i am looking for advice and/or suggestions on an interpreter or
:macro language facility which i plan on adding to my application.  are

Try looking into tcl, the Tools Command Language by John Ousterhout
(ouster at allspice.berkeley.edu); it is designed exactly for what you
are thinking of.  A paper on it was presented at the Winter 1990 
Usenix conference; it is also widely available for anon ftp (sorry,
I'm not on the Internet so I don't recall where it can be had, but
the usual 'archie' service can tell you that).  At present there are
two slightly diverging branches of the tcl family: Tcl 4.something,
enhanced by 'hackercorp' (Peter da Silva, and others) with many
modular extensions such as associative arrays and regular expressions;
and Tcl 5.something, without those enhancements but integrated with
Tk into a rich X Window System-ready environment.  From the needs
you express, I believe you'd be most interested in Tcl 4.

Other possibilities are Rexx, a nice language chosen for a similar
purpose in IBM's SAA and also dominating this field for Amiga boxes,
but I don't think you can get it for free; and others I have just
heard mentioned, such as Python.  The 'others' cathegory includes
lots of Lisps and Schemes, but I guess you could get more details
on those in comp.lang.{lisp.scheme}.
-- 
Alex Martelli - CAD.LAB s.p.a., v. Stalingrado 53, Bologna, Italia
Email: (work:) martelli at cadlab.sublink.org, (home:) alex at am.sublink.org
Phone: (work:) ++39 (51) 371099, (home:) ++39 (51) 250434; 
Fax: ++39 (51) 366964 (work only), Fidonet: 332/407.314 (home only).