Documentation for release 10.1.0

Notices and updates
Lutz
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Post by Lutz »

Have you got plenty of bandwidth for us, Lutz?
Yes, I think we have enough. I was editing (formatting) the whole day and it went smooth.
I noticed that the "recent changes" page doesn't show who made the changes.
It shows it very faint in a light grey, even if not logged in. It is hard to see. I haven't found the place yet to change that color.

The admin page is pretty big, I am just know getting familiarized with it.

cormullion
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Post by cormullion »

I've put the Introduction to newLISP on the docuwiki. I'm finding it hard to work with large documents; I suppose I should really split them up into small sections, but that's a lot of work, unless I'm missing some obvious feature. Sometimes I'm waiting over a minute for a response...

If it looks OK, this will be the new master version, and I'll archive the others.

Just a few pictures to upload: how do I do that?

Lutz
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Post by Lutz »

Your images are already up there from the HTML version of the introduction, e.g. this one:

http://www.newlisp.org/introduction-to- ... 40x100.png

or this one:

http://www.newlisp.org/introduction-to- ... editor.png

There is documentation how to use the wiki, on the index page under "wiki".

cormullion
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Post by cormullion »

Of course, thanks! The links were easily fixed.

You've done a great job, Lutz - it's all looking pretty good, and I hope that it will help us improve our documentation further.

I realise that these long documents are not suitable for the wiki approach. I cut the Introduction into two, but they're both still way too big - although the loading time for viewing is much quicker than that for editing. Ideally each section would have its own page - presumably there would be some mechanism for outputting or printing the whole lot at once. However, it's a real pain chopping up long documents, so I've chickened out of doing it for now. :)

Lutz
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Post by Lutz »

Yes, bigger pages are a pain. But the CodePatterns doc is smaller and not fast but usable. These are the workarounds, I have used:

- Click the "Edit this page" button, and then wait only twice at the beginning and the end of an editing session.

- Copy the whole page out of the edit control, then edit it offline, then past it back into the edit control. The advantage is, you can edit with your own familiar editor, which has all the facilities one is accustomed too.

So I hope that someone in UK ( or anywhere else ;-) ) fixes some problems in that Code Patterns document. And I will do all new stuff at first in the wiki for public editing.

nallen05
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Still going to support newLISP Manual?

Post by nallen05 »

Lutz

Are you still going to support the "Manual and Reference" document distributed with newLISP? In its current format (strict HTML with or without index frame) it is probably the nicest lisp manuals I have ever seen...

Nick

Lutz
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Post by Lutz »

Yes, absolutely!

And this is true for both CodePatterns.html and newlisp_manual.html (The Users Manual and Reference).

Both can be read even with very old browsers or console text browsers (lynx). An both are easy to parse (for online help, translation etc), because they use a simple HTML tagging syntax.

I am still working on CodePatterns.html to perfect it in this respect. Probably it will be translated from the wiki back into HTML with a script, after somebody made edits. CodePatterns.html has never been edited by anybody else than me, and has some pretty horrible English in there (that's what they tell me ;-) at least ).

cormullion
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Post by cormullion »

Now that we have the wiki it should be possible to review a few sections here and there, rather than try to read the whole lot in one go. I hope everyone here lends a minute or two!

I'm hoping to get round to it soon, but time slips through my fingers like sand at the moment... :)

tom
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Post by tom »

just want to point out that we could use dokuwiki namespaces too, which just sort into directories. [[manual:introduction]] makes a file "introduction" in the directory "manual".

You probably already knew that...

cormullion
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Post by cormullion »

Thanks Tom. I just stuck some colons in, like I was using newLISP.. :)

Do you know how to split up large documents into smaller sections? (Without doing it all by hand and getting totally lost while doing so.) It would be cool if there was a "split into sections" command.

newdep
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Post by newdep »

Is it an Idea to add an extra "Sign" to the functions inside the manual for
an even quicker reverence on functions..

Currently the "!" is used to point on Destructive functions.

I was thinking of adding ->

"L" returns a list

"E" returns elements

"N" retuns nil

"T" returns true
-- (define? (Cornflakes))

newdep
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FOOP simplyfied

Post by newdep »

Hello Lutz,

I dont find the manual very clear on FOOP as it currently is,
a little chaotic explained havnig examples floating between lines..

Here is the small version on how to explain the FOOP construction,
perhpas a better addon for inside the manual?

Code: Select all


;; A little help for the mindset on FOOP.
;;
;; The following are exactly the same,
;; This is to point out the construction of FOOP

;; FOOP from within the 'MAIN context
(new Class 'Rectangle)
(set 'myrect (Rectangle 5 5 10 20))
(define (Rectangle:area p) (mul (p 3) (p 4)))
(:area myrect)

;; FOOP from within other then the 'MAIN context
(new Class 'MAIN:Rectangle)
(set 'myrect (Rectangle 5 5 10 20))
(define (Rectangle:area p) (mul (p 3) (p 4)))
(:area myrect)

;; FOOP simplyfied -> 
(define (Rectangle:Rectangle) (cons (context) (args)))
(define (Rectangle:area p) (mul (p 3) (p 4)))
(Rectangle:area (Rectangle 5 5 10 20))

;; FOOP the namespace way ->
(context 'Rectangle)
(define (Rectangle) (cons (context) (args)))
(define (area p) (mul (p 3) (p 4)))
(context 'MAIN)
(Rectangle:area (Rectangle 5 5 10 20))


-- (define? (Cornflakes))

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