tirrender development language

2011/8/22

I think I will switch developing tirrender (and other
T.I.R. components?) from C to Perl.

I am reluctant because it has been very rewarding to educate myself
in C while developing tirrender, just as I used other
T.I.R. components to learn about shell script programming, and it
will be a shame to set C aside before completing tirrender.

However, an outline of requirements for the HTML rendering process
(see notes on render() in common.c) makes it obvious that there is
still a lot of code to write. Although I'm sure it can all be done in
C, and implemented more efficiently than any language other than
assembler, I'm afraid there are a number of learning curves that will
take a long time to climb as I figure out the C way of doing
things. Most of these problem spots I feel I could program by heart
in Perl.

Another reason for switching from C to Perl is that my interest in C
was partially motivated by its utility on retro platforms (ITS,
TOPS-20, VMS), but it now appears that few of these platforms can
support web sites, which reduces the usefulness of developing
HTML-generating tirrender in C (unlikely there will be any reason to
use it on non-WWW-accessible platform).

I will preserve the current version of tirrender for future
reference, and may someday return to developing the C source as an
exercise.