Three quick things this morning. TOPIC 1: HOW TO SCRIPT. You
may see my first post below on extending scripters with dynamically loaded
libraries via wrapper generation, or superglue. Such is very much more
interesting nowadays in the presence of CLR, mostly because
1. scripters
are MUCH easier to write
2. DLLs
come with full metadata, so we no longer need guesswork and empirical science (e.g.,
on export-syntax decorations)
3. Reflection
makes it VERY easy to load and to emit code. We need both for superglue. In the
old days, we had to do this manually by reading and writing machine code.
So I’ll be doing several things in this general,
long-running topic over the future. First, I’ll show how to write a scripter on
CLR by analyzing Luna-Scheme.
We want to focus on implementation issues, and Scheme is a good choice
for the following reasons:
1. we
don’t have to innovate in language design: we let someone else design the
language, for instance, IEEE Standard 1178
2. it’s
very well documented how to compile and interpret this language, so we don’t
have to so a lot of gratuitous innovating there (see SICP
and EOPL
for instance)
3. it’s
a small and simple language, by design, so we don’t have lots and lots of
gewgaws, gargoyles, gadgets, and doodads to implement
In fact, the whole point of Extension as an architectural
approach is precisely to put as much richness, depth and complexity OUT of the
scripting language and INTO the libraries. Make the scripter as simple and
small as we can; put all the complicated stuff in libraries. Building a big,
feature-packed, hairy programming language at the scripting level is not what
we’re after.
TOPIC 2: HELP ME TEST. Okay, it’s pretty obvious that I’m
filling up my blog with test posts, trying to get math into the blog. Someone
pointed out that it would be NICE if I didn’t do that, but, of course, I need
to test. So, if someone could tell me HOW to post tests off the “Main Feed” of
the blog, I’d be grateful. I am an ABSOLUTE NEWBIE to blogging, so lead me by
the hand. The ONLY things I know how to do are the things you see here. I can
write stuff and post it via default options of Newsgator and TonesNotes. That’s
it, I don’t know any more. I don’t know how to distinguish the “Main Feed” from
any other feed.
TOPIC 3: HELP MY MATH. Okay, it’s pretty obvious that I’m
getting nowhere fast trying to post math into my blog. Anyone who successfully
does math posting via WebTeX, MathType, MathML, Mathematica (Wolfram), you name
it, if you’d be willing to lead me by the hand, I’d be grateful. Once again,
I’m a blogging MORON, but I’m good at using all those other tools.