Documentation from the docstrings also has its place; I view my documentation as complementary. I'm hoping to end up with more high-level, conceptual documentation.
kens2
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Documentation: index to (almost) all of Arc
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I have a big Arc script that generates the documentation from template files. For instance, when I provide the examples, the script fills in the output. This helps ensure the examples actually work :-) The script also generates the HTML, the index, the previous and next links, etc. So most of the manual work is figuring out what everything does, figuring out the high-level organization, writing the description, and creating examples. Writing the script and templates in Arc is also an interesting way to get hands-on experience.
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See my article http://arcfn.com/2008/02/git-and-anarki-arc-repository-brief... for information on how to access anarki, in particular "Browsing Anarki without git".
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When the karma "leaders" was introduced, I found myself paying too much attention to my standing and stressing about what I should be doing to get more karma points and "beat" the next person. I rapidly decided this was silly and counterproductive, especially for meaningless points. Since I lack the willpower to just stop looking (especially when the karma score is at the top of every page), I figured the next best thing was to blow my karma by starting a new account, which forces me to not care about my karma score. I don't mean to cause confusion, let alone start an internet meme :-)
See Tim Harford's "The Logic of Life" for more discussion of ways to force yourself to behave rationally. (This is also the motivation behind the startup stickk.com) |
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Let me preface my comments by saying that I mean them constructively, not negatively.
One big problem is this project has little relevance to the world outside arclanguage.org. On the technical side, I'd suggest looking to see if anyone has made a Scheme to Common Lisp compiler, since that's an isomorphic problem. If one exists, that will give you a big start. If one doesn't exist, hmmm.... Offhand, I don't see how you're going to handle continuations or tail recursion. Note that many Scheme implementations punt on continuations (e.g. Kawa, Scheme 48, QScheme). Nil handling is also likely to be a pain. If you're looking for a way to compile Arc, I think it would be much easier to use an existing Scheme compiler as the base, rather than using a Common Lisp compiler. Using a Common Lisp compiler seems to be just adding difficulty. On the other hand, you have a lot of time budgeted to get the web server running. It seems to me that if you get Arc running, then srv.arc should just work and give you the web server for free. I think interpreting Arc (as opposed to compiling) in Common Lisp using Peter Norvig's Scheme interpreter is doable, and I'm actually currently looking into that. |
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In my previous posting, I didn't mean to use the Scheme layer as a middleman; I meant to take an existing Scheme compiler and do s/lambda/fn/g on the code (as well as other necessary changes :-) to end up with an Arc compiler.
If you're implementing a Scheme-like system, I highly recommend Dybvig's "Three Implementation Models for Scheme" (http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~dyb/pubs/3imp.pdf). The three models are a heap model, a stack model, and implementation on a crazy string-based research processor; you'd probably want the stack model. Despite being a PhD thesis, it is very practical; it describes how the author implemented Chez Scheme and gives a pretty much full Scheme implementation running on a simple virtual machine. It handwaves about converting the virtual machine code to assembly, and gives some sample VAX code in an appendix. I'll reiterate that you should look at how to make your project have a larger impact and relevance; what could you do (perhaps using your compiler as a base) that 1000 people would benefit from? |
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When you say you've been able to use srv.arc with success, do you mean the unmodified arc2.tar version or a patched version such as Anarki? Let me clarify that when I said above that srv.arc was broken, I was referring to the official version.
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I wrote up a document on how to use the git: http://arcfn.com/2008/02/git-and-anarki-arc-repository-brief...
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