Comments on scripts, modeling and Grass

[Agustin Lobo]

I agree with many of the latest comments, but I also think that
we should try to address a more concrete question now.

We should not get into the discussion of what computing language
is best, in general. This language just does not exist: information on the
different programming languages is reasonably well distributed
and most people programming are not stupid and try to use at least a
good one. Therefore, under these circumstances, if such an optimal
language existed it would have been selected and the
rest would have gone extinct. But, as in Nature, such an optimality
just does not exist and there are multiple solutions that survive
because can do reasonably well somewhere, sometime.

The question here is to decide whether we should select a
language to become the standard for "gluing" grass commands
into more complex processes. Officially, the favored
language is just the bsh since Grass3.x. I'm guilty of the
crime of not having ever followed such advice and used
the csh. The true is that, for simple flows of grass commands,
including simple interactions with the user, even the bsh or
the csh can do the job. The point here is to decide whether we
could select a different language to deal with
more complicated processes. The alternatives are:

1. Use a classic programming language, such C.
2. Use a classic script language, such bsh, csh, tcl.
3. Use a "modern" script language, such perl, python...
(sorry here: the distinction between "classic" and "modern"
scripting languages is initially based on "the-ones-I-know"
and "the-ones-that-I-don't-know", but some inputs in this 
discussion seem to suggest that this distinction is correct).
4. Use a high level language, such R, Octave (S, Matlab
and IDL are not public domain).


I think that we have now points for and against all of these
options and perhaps should make a pause in the discussion. 
I will try to prepare an example that could let us 
try the different options.


Having a common decision would be of benefit for everyone, as we
could share a sort of meta-Grass.


Agus

Dr. Agustin Lobo
Instituto de Ciencias de la Tierra (CSIC)
Lluis Sole Sabaris s/n
08028 Barcelona SPAIN
tel 34 93409 5410
fax 34 93411 0012
alobo at ija.csic.es
http://pangea.ija.csic.es/alobo