multi-g.manuals; concurrency locking

[Mark P. Line]

On Fri, 25 Mar 1994, motte wrote:

> Just a remark about Marks' last bit: I have to admit that the proprietary 
> macro language that we don't want to name here at least had the merit of 
> being rather easy to learn and providing almost all the access you 
> needed to the functionalities of the large software package that we 
> don't want to mention here, whereas getting into GRASS means using all 
> those tools like awk, sed, shell-scripting - in fact the standard UNIX 
> tools that make it such a hurdle to take for people who are interested 
> in just using the stuff (not mentioning the effort of learning C).

I prefer to see the big picture here:

Why should I pay money for packaging control structures that already exist
in Unix tools, rather than for GIS functionality? 

Many users don't just use a single system, GIS or otherwise. They use
several, and integrate them with each other the best they can. If each
different system has its own formalism for doing the everyday scripting
stuff (procedures, iteration, etc.) and for interfacing with the outside
world, then you've got to figure out how to use each one as a separate
case, and hope they can talk to each other efficiently. If designers would
take the approach (as in GRASS) of using what is provided by the
underlying platform, instead of repackaging everything so that it's all
nice and different and proprietary (the NIH syndrome), then you only need
to learn one system.

Finally, you can't really avoid having to use tools like awk or perl out
here in the real world. You have some ad-hoc, persnickety import problem,
and you can't afford to wait for some company in northern California to
upgrade their macro language so that you can get the coordinates out
northing first, or whatever. Sure, the manager types will do fine with
cut-and-dried visualization platforms where they just have to point and
click. Most GRASS users are analysts, however, and tend to be confronted
daily with the non-cut-and-driedness of the real world. In that kind of
context, you need the flexibility and bandwidth that can only be provided
by powerful languages.

> And 
> isn't GRASS in itself a shell that provides access to basic UNIX 
> funcionalities? Speaking for myself, I always have been much more at ease 
> with macro (or 4GL) languages - but then again, sometimes I work on a PC, 
> and I just love working under Windows...

So what's the difference between macro/4GL and a Unix shell, awk, perl or
Tcl? Apart from the usual proprietariness of the former, I mean?

-- Mark

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Mark P. Line                       Phone: +1-206-733-6040
Open Pathways                        Fax: +1-206-733-6040
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