Bruno Haible <br...@clisp.org> wrote: > Unfortunately, I don't see a better choice as an implementation language > of gnulib-tool: > - Python is good for text processing but does incompatible changes > in the language definition every couple of years. > - Perl is excluded because of the misdesigned syntax, and it also > has incompatible changes e.g. between perl 5.6 and 5.8.
IMHO, Perl comes closest. It is robust and may now be ubiquitous enough for our needs. It's not hard to restrict the syntax used to that (large!) subset that is portable. I'd much rather endure Perl's syntax than the arcane portability rules associated with all the shells and utilities that gnulib-tool currently uses. And I'd certainly appreciate the resulting speed-up.
