Python report-writing mechanism?

[Derek Atkins]

Quoting Jeff Carneal <jeff-ml at carneal.com>:

>
> On Mar 6, 2007, at 6:08 PM, Derek Atkins wrote:
>
>> Quoting "Michael B. Trausch" <fd0man at gmail.com>:
>>
>>> Is there any reason that Scheme is used?  It would seem (and I  could be
>>> wrong) that LISP in general is moribund... or is it used
>>> behind-the-scenes more often than is generally known?
>>
>> Historical reasons.  First, "guile" is the "official" GNU Scripting  
>> Language.
>> Second, the previous group of developers liked scheme and knew it  well.
>> In fact, some of the old GnuCash developers were also (and some still
>> are) guile developers.   Also, yes, scheme is used behind the scenes,
>> but we're slowly extracting that.
>>
>> Right now the biggest users of scheme in gnucash are:
>>
>>   1) Reports
>>   2) QIF Import
>>   3) Check Printing
>
> Would it be fair to say that rewriting any or all of these in C is a  
> medium to long term goal of the project?  Because I have given some  
> consideration to writing in a second and (temporarily) completely  
> separate reporting system in C and then removing the equivalent  
> scheme reports as the project progressed.  This is, of course, having 
>  only very cursorily looked at any of the code...

Well... Reports and Check Printing still need some non-C pieces, in
particular report configurations.  But yes, rewriting those in C
is definitely a medium to long-term goal.   A short-term goal for
reports would be something like eguile, where you supply an HTML
report template with embedded guile and then the report/HTML is
"executed".   So instead of designing a new report by writing scheme
you'd write HTML with the scheme inside it..   So when you just wanted
to change the FORMAT for the report you'd only have to modify the HTML.
Adding eguile support would be relatively straightforward and probably
a simple task for someone.

> Jeff

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
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