[Ginsu-news] The 40,000 foot parser

[Joseph P. <jpe...@me...>]

Hi all

I'm writing this from a nice house not far from the beach in New Jersey. On
the flight over yesterday, I finished up the Ginsu chunk-format parser. This
means that I can now take external files and load them into packages without
installing them in the image. Once in packages, I can then quickly install
specific classes and methods - or a whole package as once. 

My next step is to bring in the rest of the code needed to take existing
in-image artifacts and convert them to definitions. Once I have that, it's
easy to yank over the code to dump a package to chunk format.

What this gives us: this implementation covers (AFAIK) the functionality in
PackageInfo, but built on the Ginsu model base, therefore extendable to cover
the other important semantic artifacts - globals, pools and pool vars.

What's missing: Even now, I'm hurting for lack of browser support. In the
current implementation, we essentially only have 3 different (exposed)
definition types: class, method and initialization expression. The only to
edit an initialization expression, tho, is in an Inspector :-( It'll be nice
to support globals etc., but we need some kind of browser support for editing
and maintaining them. I have some ideas, but I'm open for and asking for
suggestions.

Cheers
--
Joseph Pelrine [ | ]
MetaProg GmbH
www.metaprog.com