On Thursday 24 May 2001 07:01, Joao B. Oliveira wrote:
> Before choosing a language that will affect our (happy) LyX lives,
> what requirements are really being made on this language? I
The requirements are going to vary on a user by user basis. For example, I
see the examples you listed as being important (although, macro expansion is
not quite as much a requirement for me as the others).
For me personally, the first thing that I can think of right off is the
ability to manipulate the buffer that contains a document. And, I would like
to be able to manipulate it both as displayed (ie, not reading the internal
code / structure of the document), and as stored internally (ie, with the
document structure). The reason for this is some scripts I would like to
have look at the displayed text (for items like a word count script, or other
text manipulation like swapping characters, words, lines...)
The reason for looking at the internal structure would be for things like
looking at the cvs fields which are stored as comments, or possibly hiding my
own information in comments that I can manipulate from a script.
So, basically, the way I see it is that we should really look more at what
needs to be exported and provide that. Each language should have a way to
import the commands and structures that we export.
There is another reason that I don't want to limit the language choice:
integration with pre-existing code bases. For example, I may already have a
set of scripts in perl or python that use php and mysql to dynamically
generate web content. If want to use LyX to author some of the information
that I am going to put into my online database, I would like to write an
interface script that reuses my existing perl or python code as much as
possible. (Perl and python are only examples here, you can plug in language
'x' for them.)
> Other question: what about enlarging (if necessary) the language
> already used in the minibuffer? It would be nice to have the same
> language being used twice.
Well, personally, I haven't found the language in the mini-buffer to be all
that useful at this point. I haven't found a case where I could really use
it. However, I think what we are looking at is exporting those commands and
functions to whatever language, as well as structures so you can
examine/query LyX's current state, etc.
I guess the major point is to allow both: tailoring and customizing of the
interactive editing environment, as well as providing an interface to the
rest of the world.
--
George J. De Bruin
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