Chris Browne wrote:
> jonah.harris@gmail.com ("Jonah H. Harris") writes:
>
>> On Fri, Sep 26, 2008 at 11:52 AM, Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net> wrote:
>>
>>>> Speaking of language choice, no one said that _all_ the source code would
>>>> need to be rewritten. It would be nice, for example, if PostgreSQL rewrote
>>>> the current GUC system with a glue language like Lua (which is also very
>>>> C-like).
>>>>
>>> No it wouldn't. All it would mean is that you'd need developers fluent in
>>> both languages.
>>>
>> Having done quite a bit of internals work with SAP DB (which is an
>> amalgamation of C, C++, and Pascal), I completely agree. The entire
>> system, if possible, should be in a single language.
>>
>
> Note that this actually *isn't* possible; PostgreSQL is implemented in
> a number of languages already:
> a) C, obviously
> b) m4 and some autoconf macrology
> c) GNU make
> d) There's some awk
> e) Shell script
> f) Flex
> g) Bison
>
> And I'm not sure that's all there is :-).
>
You are including build tools, which is a whole different topic. Knock
those out and you have C, flex and bison, the last two of which are in
fact preprocessors and have analogues for almost any target language we
might choose.
This whole debate is pretty pointless, ISTM.
cheers
andrew
