On 6 August 2011 14:36, Sean P. DeNigris <[email protected]> wrote: > What is the status of Coral? Is it usable? Thanks.
The syntax / compiler extension works fine and should not require much changes. All examples work for me, but it still depends too much on what flavor of the VM you have and is only tested on Mac. So, I'd say, it's useable for early adopters :) What's currently problematic is properly starting the VM in headless mode and passing it command-line arguments. This currently works with the Cog Carbon VM, and it should work with the linux VMs as well. I don't know about windows. I'd like to eliminate the generate-and-install-coral.sh step, or generate a script that doesn't hardcode paths to the VM and to the Coral image, or devise some way to install everything that makes it more practical… The problem is, different flavors of the VM don't report the same think for the VM/image/current path… There is a problem with OSProcess on the Cog Cocoa VM. I also need to check that the proper Filesystem package is installed, because the current ConfigurationOfCoral predates Colin's big refactoring. Now, for directions of improvement: I'm currently writing a (petit)parser for command-line arguments inspired by http://rubydoc.info/gems/cri/2.0.2/frames (yup, Smalltalk learns from Ruby, for once :) This will make it easy to write Coral scripts with options, flags, subcommands that respect well-known conventions for unix shell commands, properly check argument formats, etc. Eventually this will provide enough information to generate man pages, -h --help text, and even completion functions for bash and zsh. We're going to need some way to structure script code. I don't think we want an include/require statement to write scripts in several files, but there should be a way for a script to depend on code that is not in the base Coral image. Maybe loading parcels? The Console class provides basic access to ANSI escape sequences but this could be refactored. This will be needed for the next steps… …I want a text-mode inspector and debugger integrated in the REPL. I'm jealous of Ruby having https://github.com/pry/pry#readme :) -- Damien Pollet type less, do more [ | ] http://people.untyped.org/damien.pollet
