[q-lang-users] Q, QCalc and Pure

[Rob H. <hub...@gm...>]

Dear Albert,

[I'm posting to both the Q and Pure mailing lists, although I'm only 
subscribed to the former at present.]

Sorry I've been so quiet about Q recently. Of course, I see that Q has 
pretty much been superseded by Pure now.

I had been eagerly anticipating QCalc for Windoze, wondering whether 
that has essentially been shelved now. I note from the Pure user mailing 
list archive that you have addressed such questions before, but I was 
wondering whether there's an update on your progress with the 
"purification" of QCalc and Qpad.


I have just installed Pure 0.5, finally. (It's been on my list of things 
to do for quite a while.) I installed the MSI for Windows (as 
administrator). Running the shell (as another user: me), I got the 
following surprise:
    > 1:2:3:[];
    [1,2,3]
    > 1+2;
    1+2
So, lists worked as expected, but arithmetic didn't.

However, when I ran this as Administrator, I got:
    > 1+2;
    3
as expected.

This looks like a tedious, but minor, installer bug. I look a quick look 
around, and found the <ReadMe.txt> file (distinct from the <README> 
file). I manually set up the environment variable
    PURELIB=C:\Program Files\Pure\lib
in the Start | Settings | Control Panel | System | Advanced | 
Environment Variables

After that, running the shell (as me) worked fine.

This problem will only bite those Windoze users that bother to set up 
separate user accounts.

Perhaps the installer could have an "install for all users" option 
(putting this variable in the system rather than user environment)? 
Alternatively, perhaps Pure could warn of the problem and suggest 
reading ReadMe.txt.


By the way, part of the reason for shying away from Pure up until now 
was the mention of LLVM and MinGW; I thought installation of the 
dependencies might be awkward (and I'm a lazy Windoze user, though I am 
a fan of Cygwin). However, the MSI made things very easy. [So thanks too 
to Jiri.]


Thanks and best wishes,
Rob.