[GRASS5] Want GNU libavl ?

[Bernhard Reiter]

On Thu, Jan 24, 2002 at 01:36:52PM -0500, Robert Lagacé wrote:
> I would like to make another proposal maybe for GRASS 6 : put in 
> libraries (which is already started) all computationnal stuff and 
> use Python as the glue logic (interfaces, user interaction, applications, 
> etc.).  We will retain the avantages of shell scripts without all 
> the problems associated with shell scripts.  Plus, we will gain an 
> free interpreter equivalent to MapBasic and the one used in ArcInfo. 
> With this, we open the possibility for users to write their own 
> applications.  I invite those interested to look to wxPython, an 
> interface wxWindows to python and run the demo.

As a known friend of python I of course sympathize with the suggestion.
However GRASS 6 is far away and we have many task to solve.
We cannot decide on radical long term plans.

GRASS is a huge project and we need to be conservative.
It carries a history and stories from users.
C will be GRASS' main language for quite some time to come.
I recommend to keep it this way for the core of GRASS
for the foreseeable future.

But we have to keep this in mind: GRASS is Free Software.
We won't stop anybody from doing any experiments they want.
Regarding GRASS this will be experimental add-ons.
Why not reimplementing a Free Software GIS in python,
based on GRASS libraries?
The packages on freegis.org show that there is much energy
and room for experiments. 

If a person asks what can be done for GRASS, 
there are many task to solve first. A lot have to do with code-cleanup.
We need to get this done first.
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