Re: [HACKERS] Embedding scripting

Thus spake bibach@execpc.com
>    Has anyone thought of making use of an embedded scripting package
> in PostgreSQL?  This would be something along the lines of TCL or
> Guile.  I'd lean towards Guile, personally, as it seems the most
> flexible.  Guile is an embeddable Scheme (a dialect of Lisp)
> interpreter.  The nice thing about it is that the version of Scheme
> that it implements is powerful enough to "emulate", if you will, other
> languages.  In fact, the guys who put Guile together have already
> implemented what they call CTAX, which is a syntax very similar to C.
>    I'm thinking we could intergrate this in with the Postgres parser
> (and probably the SQL Function managing code) to give us all sorts of
> new tricks.  For instance, this might be a nice, easy, powerful way to
> implement some of the extensions to SQL that many commericial packages
> have (ie, variables, loops, conditionals, etc).
>    What does everyone think of something like this?

I find that the Tcl package works pretty good as a 4GL for me.  Perhaps
we can look at adding more functionality to make it simpler.  That was
the idea behind my pg_select command.  It makes a very simple loop.

I have also done a lot of stuff for embedding forms into the database
but it is all based on external tables.  I talked about this before
but it was put off till after the next release.  Perhaps we can reopen
that discussion now.

If anyone wants to see what I have, look at http://www.druid.net/darcy/tcldb/.

- --
D'Arcy J.M. Cain                           |  Democracy is three wolves
darcy@{druid.net|vex.net}                  |  and a sheep voting on
+1 416 424 2871     (DoD#0082)    (eNTP)   |  what's for dinner.
                --  http://www.druid.net/darcy  --

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