Hi Thomas,
welcome to the world of APL!
I did not know rlwrap before, but I just installed it and tried APL with
it. Cool!
As you may have seen there were some problems in GNU APL recently that seems
to be readline related. The root cause of these problems is still
unknown. After having
GNU APL ./configured with --without-readline and then started it from
rlwrap, it looks
like these problems do not occur (more tests needed, though) and full
readline functionality
is still there.
As you may have seen as well, Elias is working on emacs integration with
GNU APL. It would
be good if there were a common solution for emacs, vim, and other
editors. IBM APL2 has
an )EDITOR command while GNU APL has not (yet).
I personally find it strange to open an editor for a single line of
input, but it makes sense to
do that for larger objects like APL functions or larger variables. For
one-liners xterm combined
with middle-mouse-button copy/past is still the fastest way to edit.
I would be interested what is needed to start an editor via libreadline.
Best Regards,
Jürgen Sauermann
On 02/13/2014 05:18 PM, Thomas Baruchel wrote:
Hi, first of all, I am a new APL user; I wish to learn APL mostly with GNU APL
(I installed NGN + nodejs as well as Dyalog APL on my raspberry however).
Since I have been coding in several other languages for many years, I would be
happy to help if I can.
First of all, I started a new blog: http://apl-adventures.tumblr.com/ with all
my experiments.
Please, could you have a look at my second "trick" on the following post:
http://apl-adventures.tumblr.com/post/76529518369/some-tricks-for-using-apl-under-linux
In two words, I tried to launch GNu APL from rlwrap. It can sound weird since
GNU APL has its own readline support, but I
found something very useful to me. rlwrap uses the readline library with a
custom function allowing to launch an editor
from the readline library at any time for a one-line shot. (you hit
Ctrl-something, you get your EDITOR (environment
variable) launched, Vim, emacs or whatever, you finish editing your line, you
save, you leave, and you have your line
interpreted).
Since an APL line is something more complicated than a line in other languages
(unicode characters, etc.), I think it could
be useful to do the same in GNU APL: define a special readline function (the
user can decide to use it or not from his/her
own ~/.inpurtc file) and launch the EDITOR from the REPL.
I had a look at the GNU readline manual and found it should be quite easy to do
it.
What do you think of the idea?
Regards,
