[Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Oct 29, 2002 at 12:15:50PM -0800, Guy Harris wrote:
> Yes, I think that is a reason to implement it now.  I'd like to see taps
> uses as a very general extension mechanism for Ethereal, so people can
> make add-on modules for graphing, computing statistics, doing "expert"
> analysis, etc. (which is why I wanted to be able to just pass a protocol
> tree to a tap; that way, you don't have to modify dissectors to provide
> information that a tap would use, and you can write taps that do things
> that the dissector writer didn't anticipate).

...and then provide a way to write taps in a scripting language, so you
don't have to be a C programmer to write them - or, ideally, languages,
so that it doesn't matter whether you like Perl or Python or Ruby or
REXX or Visual Basic (or clones thereof for UNIX) or....