Oleg Kobchenko <[email protected]> wrote:

> It is a little confusing: you advocate projects, but condemn stand-alone
> scripts. Aren't projects there to produce stand-alone scripts?
> I understand, the only true purpose of a project is concatenation of
> multiple files into one.

No, that is just an optional feature.  To quote the User Manual and
Wiki (http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/Project%20Manager/Overview)::

        Project Manager lets you work with applications that are
        built from several scripts. You can specify scripts to be
        included in the application, scripts required for development
        purposes only, and how the application is to be built.

As I already wrote, I for one don't care about the "single-script"
feature, or the "nuke comments" feature.  The things I still find
valuable enough to use/provide project files:

- Project file provide a simple convention to list what
  is used in which way in a project.  I like that.  A lot.
  Isn't it nice that you can find out quickly which files
  are "just" test harness?

- Automating "how the application is built" is really essential
  for me.  In my case, in can mean things like "run awk on a
  C header file to create a J script with 150  cd  functions
  calling into an OLAP library".

My J clients who use the IDE usually start at a level where are not
yet capable to create their own project files from scratch; however,
they like it that I provide a project with every project I do with
them because the J IDE makes it so easy to open projects and navigate
around files then.

So yes, Virginia, people do like PM but not necessarily for going
single-script.

                                                                Martin
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