Re: Emacs setup assistants

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>]

Thien-Thi Nguyen <ttn@glug.org> writes:

> the most well-supported machinery would be straight elisp (which
> is also easy to write and parse visually, for some).  i think if i
> were to write a setup assistant, i would find the markup approach
> cumbersome (as opposed to the assistant-library-API approach),
> because it requires understanding the implicit API anyway; using
> markup w/o this understanding is a false economy.

Writing an assistant as straight elisp would be very dull, because
it's so repetitive.  You have inputs, you have branches, you have
text, and writing that programmatically over and over again would be
a pain.

Not to mention difficult to maintain.

The point of the language proposed here (an extension of TeXinfo,
which is a language that most Emacs developers are already familiar
with (to a greater or lesser degree)) is to make it easy and pleasant
to write assistants.  That way, there's a greater chance that they'll
get written, and that they'll be maintained. 

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
  larsi@gnus.org * Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen