Re: [ferret_users] Re: ferret into the future

[Steve Hankin <Steven.C.Hankin@xxxxxxxx>]

Hi John and Ryo,

Thank you both for your comments and suggestions.  Indeed, the Ferret 
scripting language could be greatly improved.  It has grown 
incrementally over many years -- a process that always leads to plenty 
of imperfections.

The possibility certainly does exist of wedding Ferret to a more 
powerful scripting language.  The scope of this work is unfortunately 
larger than we can take on at this time.  Support for the general Ferret 
community and email list (outside of specific targeted users and 
applications) is a service that we supply largely out of hide/unfunded.

Many great additions have been made to Ferret, however, in the spirit of 
open source development.  If anyone in the Ferret community would like 
to have a look at an alternative scripting environment, we would 
definitely welcome that.  And we would provide assistance in every way 
that we could to help that effort to succeed.

    - Steve

=============================================

Ryo Furue wrote:

> John and ferret users,
>
> | [...] but that there are major issues with
> | user-friendliness. Those who know ferret "backwards and
> | forwards" are probably happy with it as it is and that I'm
> | crazy to suggest it needs a major overhaul in that respect.  
> I'm not sure what you meant by "user-friendliness", but I kind
> of agree that ferret is a bit weak on that front.  I'm not
> particularly a fan of GUI interfaces, so I'll leave that
> subject to other people.  What I find to be a bit weak is
> ferret's scripting language, which is---how should I put it---arcane.
> I wish it were simpler _and_ more powerful.
>
> I think to change the language would be a huge work, which
> I'm not sure can be done at all.  But, anyway---What I have
> in mind is a "normal" programming language:  For example,
>
>   view = {"topleft", "topright", "bottomleft", "bottomright"}
>   do i = 1, $n
>      set viewport $view($i)
>      if ($label == "velocity")
>         vector u[d=$i],v[d=$i]
>      elseif ($label == "temperature")
>         fill average(temp[d=$i], dim = "z") !! vertical average
>      else
>         print "unknown label."; stop 1
>      endif
>   enddo
>
> That is, if the language were more regular and straightforward
> and similar to other popular computer languages
> (Fortran, C, Matlab, etc.), it would be more readily accessible
> to users.
>
> Ryo
>  
--
--

Steve Hankin, NOAA/PMEL -- Steven.C.Hankin@noaa.gov
7600 Sand Point Way NE, Seattle, WA 98115-0070
ph. (206) 526-6080, FAX (206) 526-6744