[plt-scheme] should .scm's be text-only?
--- Eli Barzilay <eli at barzilay.org> wrote:
> On Dec 24, George Herson wrote:
> > [...]
> > As written by DrScheme to file as text:
> >
> > ;«Insert-Fraction
> > (+ 3 (/ 4 5))
> > ;»
> > ;«Insert-Comment-Box
> > ;(display "This line is commented out and in
> DrScheme
> > ; appears in a proper comment box.")
> > ;»
> > [...]
>
> This is better than trying to force s-expressions
> into something that
> is used as both the actual language and the encoding
> of binary objects
> (context: this is from previous discussion).
Agreed. There's no reason not to make the distinction
clear, and this new way allows analogs to the DrScheme
special objects to work in non-DrScheme Schemes.
> However, it is still
> suffering from issues: the resulting file is no
> longer read/editable
> by plain tools -- for example, the text will be
> sensitive to
> indentation,
No, there's no sensitivity to indentation. Just the
lines starting flush left with ;« and ;» will be
imbued with special meaning and shouldn't be edited
except by DrScheme. The issue of having machine-added
lines in (configuration) files is commonly dealt with
by inserting a warning at top of file to not edit. In
this case, the file itself is editable in any plain
text editor, it's just those particular lines that
shouldn't be hand-edited (unless you know what you're
doing).
> you need to remember that the newline
> after the ;» marker
> is important,
again, the user will be warned to leave those lines
alone. No big deal, i think.
> you will need some other solution for
> font information
> (otherwise the text is going to all be made of these
> things).
I didn't see any way to enter font info in DrScheme.
Pls explain?
> Also,
> you're trying to find some way that can textualize
> all of these
> objects, but they can come from arbitrary snip
> implementations that
> can have no meaningful textual representation. Oh
> and don't forget --
> you will need to make sure that the solution works
> fine for Java files
> and generic text files.
what is meant by snip implementations? what issues
might arise re: Java files and generic text files?
i'll be happy to try to address them... I'll address
all i can but I haven't your knowledge of the issues,
which is necessary to take this further. Perhaps we
should take the discussion off-list again until i (we)
have something presentable?
(small correction: to my original post yesterday: we
can't display an image's alternate text (because with
the image's url as the only info given, that's all
that can be shown).)
thx,
George Herson