Re: [Amforth] New forth interaction script

[Matthias T. <mt...@we...>]

Hi Keith,

> Ah, I think this is working as I intended but the behavior may be 
> somewhat surprising to others, I'm not sure.  I made the assumption 
> that well behaved upload files never generate output because in my 
> use cases for the class I was helping develop they consisted of one 
> of two types of files:
> 
> 1) definitions of words 2) tests written using the tester.frt package
> from the library
> 
> In both these cases, output generally indicated a problem

Not necessarily. I've seen quite a lot forth code that prints
some messages with .( text to indicate some progress ) that
is definitly not an error message. Same with the output of
the tester.

> My preferred methods would be to modify the file with comments that 
> direct the script to treat specific lines generating output more 
> appropriately.  I'm going to show some solutions based on your test 
> file but I don't have access to my microcontroller to test these 
> right now so they may not be completely correct.

Editing the source files builds a rather high barrier for your
excellent tool. For me your ideas sound like introducing concepts
like Design By Contract
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_by_contract). Something the
Forthers do not (yet?) think about.

> Matthias> My next topic on the wishlist is the inclusion of the 
> Matthias> environment variable AMFORTH_LIB for a list of directories 
> Matthias> in which the tool looks for a given file.
> 
> That would be really handy as well.  I unfortunately don't have time
>  to work on it right now but if you don't get to it before I get time
>  I'll take a crack at it when I do.

I collect the changes in the repository at
http://amforth.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/amforth/trunk/tools/amforth-term.py?view=log

Matthias