I might think about making a noob-oriented Arc IDE. Ideally I would have the console/output be within the IDE itself (rather than run stuff in an external OS console.)
What would be the easiest way of doing that? I tried looking through the PLT source but it was not very straightforward...
I've been using a setup for running the arc server that allows me to connect to an already running arc service. I have a shell/mzscheme file that launch the arc server, and in a separate thread runs the repl parameterized to read and write on two pipes. Then I have another shell program that just reads from the one pipe, and writes to the other. Finally, I rlwrap that, and I'm connected to the arc repl just as if I had run it normally from the command line.
It's great for making a server that can be launched by cron or initd, and still be able to connect to it. You could alternatively use a socket based system, or disable the close-on-eof, and then you wouldn't have to worry about quitting your server when you disconnect. Though, odds are you aren't going to be worrying about that anyway, as you're only using it for an ide.
thanks. i'm on Windows though and slightly fascist and unreasonable in that i'm not particularly worried about the program working on another platform. i should have mentioned that though. (also i think if anyone needs a noob-oriented IDE, it's going to be Windows users)
The same system should work for windows. Windows does support named pipes, and you don't have to use unix shell code to launch the arc process, since you're writing another program anyway.
Yes, but anyone running Windows is much less likely to use emacs or vim over some gui ide. Linux users are much more likely to be willing to learn those two.
It does most of what you describe (connecting/disconnecting from a running Arc repl). I don't know if you can use it to save cron jobs, but that's not something I typically need to do.
Yes, I use screen very heavily, and I do use it to leave an arc process running, and connect to it again later.
But it can't connect to an arc repl that was executed by a non-interactive shell, such as via cron or initd. That's what I use the pipe system for, and a similar system could easily be used by an ide to communicate with arc and not create a visible shell window.
Have you looked at arc-welder (arc IDE distributed with rainbow, uses java/swing for UI) ?
You can evaluate code from the IDE, although for the moment output goes to the console. This is trivial to change though. I've just recently added a crude jump-to-definition feature so it's quick and easy to find function and macro definitions. Screenshot at http://www.fnargs.com/2009/05/introducing-welder.html
I'm preparing a new, faster rainbow which will hopefully be ready in the next few days. Let me know if you're interested in trying it out.
You might look at prompt.arc for a starting point. It allows Arc expressions to be evaluated from a web page; your IDE could connect to the running Arc process as an HTTP client and evaluate Arc expressions in the same way.
No I haven't. I've been meaning to look into that, but so far I've just been using arc.el. If you know anything about getting arc to work with slime, and have any success in that area, I'd be interested.
i actually use Vim which is more than sufficient for my needs. what i'm thinking of making is a completely noob-oriented IDE, one where ideally the user does not even have to know about mzscheme this or arc3.tar that
