Hi,
This isn't a bug report per se, more of an observation / criticism on
the mechanism for setting the hugs path. The mechanism for permanently
setting the hugs path seems inconsistent with other command line
applications, and is somewhat error prone.
In other interpreted environments or applications which run from the
command line in Win32 (such as java), the interpreter's path is usually
set by a good old-fashioned environment variable. This approach has
some minor shortcomings (in particular, it requires editing the
autoexec.bat file under win95/98 in order to make any environment
changes permanent), but on balance it seems to work reasonably well.
Hugs has instead chosen another mechanism, where changes made by use of
the ":set" command within the interpreter get permanently commited to an
undocumented location in the Windows Registry database.
I just had a minor typo in a :set -P;<new path component> command. In
order to fix it, I could see no other alternative than to go and edit
the Windows Registry manually.
>From what I can tell, the persistent ":set" command:
- is more work to implement than a simple environment
variable
- leads to gratuitous inconsistency between Unix and Windows
versions.
- is more of a user maintenance headache, since:
- registry entries are more difficult to copy
across machines than a one-liner in a batch file
- the location searched in the registry may be
different for minor releases of hugs, potentially
forcing the user to re-configure their hugs path
for every minor release of hugs.
- there is no easy way to "experiment" with
different paths, since every ":set" command has
a permanent effect.
- forces the user to do direct registry editing (which is
dangerous and error prone) to fix simple mistakes like a
typo in a ":set" command.
I hope these observations are helpful if this issue is ever revisited in
future releases.
-antony
--
Antony Courtney
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.apocalypse.org/pub/u/antony
