As much as I am a fan of extensions, I have to admit that I don't fully understand the justification for this. After all, the pkg-commands are plain functions, so why not expose them as such?
Regards, Elias On 3 May 2014 13:27, "David B. Lamkins" <dlamk...@gmail.com> wrote: > During a few idle moments at work today, I flipped through some of the > BAA archives and came across a short article regarding Dyalog's > extension to allow user-defined commands. > > Yah, I know... Dyalog. But hear me out. > > I've been thinking ahead to a time when I'll be ready to roll out the > package manager. Some of my thoughts have turned to user interface > issues. > > I can of course make an APL-only UI by simply providing functions. But > wouldn't it be nice to have a way to access the UI using a not-strictly > APL syntax (rather: something that might admit, for example, simple > search terms or pathnames without quoting; or maybe even the kind of > interface that supports a limited vocabulary of subjects and verbs.) > > For example, rather than invoking something like: > > pkg_load 'package-name' > > I could write: > > ]pkg load package-name > > The main benefit in this example is a trivial simplification of syntax. > On the other hand, the ] serves as a visual reminder in the transcript > that this particular operation was - from the user's viewpoint - a > session command and not an operation in the program being used. > > I envision a really simple interface to this feature. GNU APL would > recognize a prefix (something like gnu∆apl∆cmd_) on the name of a > monadic function and bind that function to be called when the suffix of > that function's name is present as the name of a ] command. For example: > > ]pkg > > would call the monadic function gnu∆apl∆cmd_pkg. > > The remainder of the line following the command's invocation would be > passed as a string to the command (after stripping leading and trailing > blanks). It'd be the responsibility of the user-defined APL function to > parse or interpret any supplied arguments. For example: > > ]pkg list all missing > > would execute gnu∆apl∆cmd_pkg 'list all missing'. > > I sussect that the main changes needed would be to > 1) extend the ] command lookup to search for an APL function, and > 2) build a string to pass to APL's internal execute. > > > >
