Re: Comments on process template syntax

[Kyle Meyer <kyle@kyleam.com>]

Hi Ricardo,

Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net> writes:

> Hi,
>
> While looking at the examples at https://www.guixwl.org/beyond-started,
> I found that process templates might be difficult to understand, and
> that they have no pretty syntax.
>
> --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
> process: (list-file-template filename)
>   name
>     string-append "list-file-"
>                   basename filename
>   packages "gzip"
>   inputs filename
>   outputs
>     string-append filename ".list"
>   run-time
>     complexity
>       space 20 mebibytes
>       time  30 seconds
>   # { gzip --list {{inputs}} > {{outputs}} }
> --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---
>
> The first line is easy to understand for lispers but it might look weird
> to people who come from other workflow languages or programming
> languages.  [...]

Yeah, I agree that first line could be the source of a good amount of
head scratching, though I can't think of a better alternative.  (Then
again, one of the more superficial reasons I like the idea of GWL is the
ability to write in lisp, so I'm probably lacking vision/motivation.)

> (FWIW, I intend to rename the “process:” macro to just “process” to
> remove confusing syntactic noise, so anything about the first line may
> be changed.)

Hmm, but wouldn't that conflict with the `process' constructor defined
in gwl/processes.scm?