Hi Elias,
The axis can be any APL value, so you can use a string or some
structured context
as axis argument. I believe there should still be some structure so that
people can
deal with different libraries. The idea of using an axis is that the
axis contains information
about a function while the normal left and right arguments are passed as
parameters
into the function.
We could also think about passing the APL name (i.e. the right argument
of ⎕FX) of the function
to the function so that you can share the same library under different
names in APL and every
name could call its own functions.
Regarding libraries, I have seen a strong need for that for years. But
looking at the relatively
small community of GNU APL (compared to commercial vendors) we need
libraries that are
useful also for other APL interpreters. I also think that shared libs in
the form of .so files are
too cumbersome to be used as libraries, I see native functions more as
wrapper functions in
order to interface 2ith libraries written in other languages.
/// Jürgen
On 04/03/2014 09:43 AM, Elias Mårtenson wrote:
As previously mentioned, I'm currently hacking away at SQL
integration. Like all native libraries in GNU APL, the system is
accessed using a function number together with the variable that is
bound in the ⎕FX call.
There are, however, two limitations that I would like to see addressed:
First of all, one might want to use more than one function since
remembering the function numbers is a bit ugly. Secondly, one might
not want to implement all of the functionality in C++. Parts of the
code would be much better written in APL itself.
Thus, we need the following:
* A way to load APL code packaged in a library (the APL code
initialiser could do the necessary ⎕FX calls to load the native
code, if such exists)
* A way to separate symbols in different namespaces. If two
libraries define functions or variables with the same name, there
would be problems.
Ideally, I'd like to be able to do something like:
)LoadWhatever 'SQLite3'
db ← *SQLite.init* '/path/to/database'
result ← db *SQLite.query* 'select * from foo'
*SQLite.close* db
(the above shows what my current SQLite implementation would look like
if we had these features)
The )LoadWhatever command would load APL code in a similar way as the
-f flag does when starting the interpreter.
About namespaces, here's a video about them in Dyalog. It's a pretty
good idea: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XS5Hekf9a9I
Regards,
Elias
