Re: It works!

["Ralf S. Engelschall" <nospam@thanx>]

On Sat, Aug 01, 1998, Tabe Kooistra wrote:

> After some initial problems I managed to get WML to work. (I had some
> problems with my perl installation) 
> 
> I gotta say, I am very enthusiastic about it. I can really program
> web-sites now!
> I really like the huge amounts of tools. I had some experience with
> metahtml and several other htlm-preprocessors like php already but
> that's peanuts compared to the enhanced power of WML. I think I will
> stick with it.
> 
> Keep up the good work!

Thanks for such positive feedback. I'm glad to hear this.  

But there _is_ a drawback because of the huge amount of tools/passes every WML
1.x user will recognize at some time: I reduces the runtime performance
dramatically. This week my diploma thesis is finished and one of the results
of it is an architecture and prototype for a meta-language translation tool
which can be used as the basis for WML 2.x. Not all meta-language constructs
can be really evaluation at the same time, so one still needs at least 3
passes to achieve the same power as in WML 1.x.  But that's a lot better than
WML's 9 passes. And one more result is that the evaluation itself is better
performed on an Abstract Syntax Tree instead directly on the character
sequences (what WML 1.x does). 

So, as a summary: The meta-language based power of WML has really proofed to
be good, but it can be implemented a lot better :-( 

Initially I thought after finishing the diploma thesis (DA) I'll immediately
work on WML 2.x by starting from this prototype of the DA. But as it currently
looks there will be a delay of approx. a few months. Because currently I'm in
contact with two international publishers about the idea for a "very compact
Apache reference book". And the chance is high that this will be the next
project... ;-)
                                       Ralf S. Engelschall
                                       rse@engelschall.com
                                       www.engelschall.com
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