On 01/08/2012 02:05 AM, Gerry Weaver wrote:
Hello All,
Thank you for all of your responses. They are really helping me get a better
picture of Pharo, the environment, and the community.
I really like the idea of a REPL type interface. If I understand correctly, all
of the functionality that deals with class/method definition is already there.
It seems like it would be a matter of writing a little server type application
that would communicate via stdin/stdout. I assume one could then send messages
to the code that evaluates methods/function definitions and provide result
feedback via stdout. Maybe it could also understand some commands like doit and
accept. It could be interesting to have a TCP based interface as well. How
difficult would it be to do something like this? I may start looking into this.
It seems like a good project to jump into the deep end, start paddling, and
drinking a little water (hopefully not too much). Is the code that handles this
kind of thing readily accessible? I've started looking around a bit.
The answer is that it is basically trivial to do and many people have
already done it in various forms - I even did a TCP server for Joe
Armstrong (one of the creators of Erlang) that does similar things:
http://www.squeaksource.com/JoesServer.html
...BUT... when it comes to Joe he wanted to use Squeak from Erlang in
order to dynamically create UIs etc. So he had a reasonable use case. ;)
...if you just happe to "like REPLs" then you should really try to use
and learn the Squeak/Pharo IDE. Think of it as a full blown live graphic
REPL with tons of cool tools. Every text area in Pharo/Squeak is a
"REPL" anyway.
regards, Göran
