Re: Using guile as an extension language for GNU make

[Thien-Thi Nguyen <ttn@gnuvola.org>]

() Paul Smith <psmith@gnu.org>
() Sun, 18 Sep 2011 15:28:00 -0400

   [new impl]

   That's better than what I had before, but I still have some concerns.
   For example, what if a Guile call wanted to return a list?  I can use
   display as above, but the list will be enclosed in parentheses, which is
   not how make displays lists.  Is there a clean way to handle this?

"Clean" in what way?  Everything depends on what the expected (valid) use
of this facility would be.  Could you give some examples (w/ failure cases)?

   I could write a function then invoke it with scm_map() (right?) but this
   seems like it might be work.

Everything is work.  Even play is work (but hopefully more fun/interesting).

   Also what if the data structure is more complex, where some elements of the
   list are lists themselves, etc.?  I can "flatten" the entire thing out, I
   suppose.

Yes.

   Or I could ignore them as above and require the Guile scripting to
   convert the list into a string before returning it.

Right.  The protocol is internal; you can choose 60/40 or 40/60.

I think concomitant w/ this particular hacking it would nice to implement
some of the make functions (e.g., ‘patsubst’) in Scheme.  Enough of that
and you will end up {in,con}verting the "embedding" effort to an "extending"
effort as suggested by Ludo -- YHBW!  :-D