greg heil wrote: > i am trying to figure out how project files work and what seems to be > J's caching behaviour is making it difficult ... too sticky, i have to > close J down for each step of experimentation. > > Eg i found that project files interpret NB. comment lines. The noun > OTHERFILES interprets such lines into the Other tab within the Project > Manager, resulting in eg, > ~binary\nb.~projects\life\test0.ijs > The test button even seems to run off that spurious line! > > Changing that noun in a project file is not reflected by builds or > refresh tabs in the Project Manager, nor by deleting the built file, > only by exiting and rebooting J. > > There generally seems to be some difficulty in getting J to recognise > that files have changed. Eg i have not been able to get J to update an > ijs file which was modified by an outside text editor ... requires > closing the J editor window for the file and creating a new editor > window for it. At least a refresh capability would be useful, if not > detection of change and prompt for update.
The ijx and ijs windows are read and written on request, and do not continually check whether they have been updated by an external process. This practice is common in Windows text editors, but whether J should do so is debatable - it involves a lot of mechanism that is probably more trouble than it is worth. It is easiest just to avoid editing a script in J and in an external editor at the same time. Project files are normal script files loaded with 0!:0, and do not interpret NB. comment lines. They are intended to be read and written by the Project Manager. In normal use, you need not modify them directly, and if you are doing so, you are likely missing some feature in Project Manager that will do it for you. If you do modify them outside Project Manager, take care to preserve their format. It looks like you changed it somehow. If a project is opened in Project Manager, it is not going to continually re-read the project, just in case an external program has changed it - in this case, exit Project Manager, make your changes, then reload it. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
