Hi, I've just been trying out the latest January release of Hugs 1.4,
on Windows NT 4.0. I found it better than previous releases and
was able to get fran and Haskore working. Great!
We are hoping to let loose several hundred students on it and the Linux
version in a couple of months time -- first year students through to third
year students. Many of them will install it at home, so I was particularly
interested to see how easily the installation goes and what their first
impressions of the system will be.
I found myself confused/surprised by a few things at first
(I used the InstallWizard version, from the administrator account)
A "Hugs" shortcut was put into the start menu of just
the administrator account (it might be better in "all users"?).
However, there was no menu entry for the nice interface version
("winhugs")? Later, I found the Windows-specific readme file -- it
suggests that not putting winhugs into the menu is intentional, because
winhugs is old technology?
When I ran winhugs, it couldn't find its help file and
the editor button didn't work. Both of these can be easily
fixed, but are barriers to novices.
But my main concern is that there is not enough help to guide novices
when they first start up Hugs. For example:
When I used the menu entry to start Hugs (the console version),
it comes up correctly and everything works. However, I wanted
to try a demo (eg. fran) and wasn't sure how to do it. I tried
(1) :load lib/demos/fran/...
This didn't work because the current directory was somewhere
else, of course.
(2) :load C:/hugs/lib/demos/fran/...
This loads correctly and gives me a prompt.
But what do I (with my novice hat on) do next?
(Is there any way of getting help on what names have been
defined in the top-level module just loaded and how to
call those names? The ideal would be to print some help
information as the module is loaded.)
As a semi-expert :-), I decided to try 'main'.
This started the demo, which then aborted with an error
about not finding some data file -- again because it was
expecting the current directory to be in the fran area.
(3) Exit hugs, go into the fran directory and double-click
on the demo I wanted to run. This starts hugs again.
This works fine (though the fran output window seems to have an
uncanny knack of coming up *under* the hugs console window so
that the output is hidden -- that tricked me a few times).
Similar difficulties apply to the standard Hugs demo files
(Eliza, etc). It's easy to load them by clicking on them,
but each one has a different convention for how to use it.
So, my suggestions for making the Windows version more novice-friendly
are:
- move the Windows Readme file up to the top level directory
where people will see it and also install a menu shortcut for it.
- in that file, give brief descriptions of a few of the demos
and how to drive them.
As well as specific comments about favourite demos, a general
comment like this might be helpful:
There are several small demo Haskell scripts in the `demos'
directory (e.g. eliza.hs). To run one of these demos, start up
your favourite text editor (e.g. Wordpad), and read the .hs
file to decide which functions you want to call. If there
is a `main' function defined, it is a good one to call.
Then double-click on the file to load it into Hugs.
Then, in the Hugs window, type in the name (and any arguments)
of the function you want to call.
(I suggest Wordpad, because it comes standard with NT 4.0, and handles
UNIX-style newlines better than Notepad).
BTW: Like in previous versions, I still couldn't get the graphics
stuff working. It gives the same error as before -- something
about GraphicsLoader module *not* being already loaded, even
though it has been. If this is not a known error, let me know
and I'll send more details.
Sorry about the volume of these comments.
Thanks for all your great work!
Mark.
Dr Mark Utting, Lecturer
Department of Computer Science
School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences
The University of Waikato Tel: +64 7 838 4791
Private Bag 3105 Fax: +64 7 838 4155
Hamilton Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
New Zealand Web: http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~marku
The highest bandwidth output from a human is the notes pouring
from a concert pianist's fingers. [About 100 Mbaud peak output?]
