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

[Albert G. <Dr....@t-...>]

Hi Rob, welcome back!

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

Note that your post didn't get to the Pure ml because you're not 
subscribed (same spam fighing measure as on the Q ml).

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 pretty much been superseded by Pure now.

As a matter of fact, yes. It's just so much faster and better. :) There 
are still a few things missing, but I'm working on these.

> I had been eagerly anticipating QCalc for Windoze, wondering whether 
> that has essentially been shelved now.

This will happen at some point. Right now, there's other stuff that I 
need to fix up first. I'm currently working on lazy data structures, 
next thing will be support for matrices and vectors so that interfacing 
to GSL becomes a breeze. Other stuff that's already been implemented in 
svn since 0.5 is support for private symbols, unicode operator symbols, 
sentries (object finalizers), references and macros, so it's quickly 
getting to the point where most of Q's major features are provided in 
some way.

>     > 1:2:3:[];
>     [1,2,3]
>     > 1+2;
>     1+2
> So, lists worked as expected, but arithmetic didn't.

Yes, as you suspected that's because the prelude wasn't found (1:2:3:[] 
works without that because [1,2,3] is just syntactic sugar that's built 
into the interpreter).

> Perhaps the installer could have an "install for all users" option 
> (putting this variable in the system rather than user environment)?

Right, I'll have to look into that, I'm running as admin myself so I 
never noticed this.

> 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).

That's only true if you need to install LLVM from source (although it's 
not that difficult, if you use the install docs included in the Pure 
source, and the guide that Jiri has written on mingw installation).

Fortunately, we already have ready-made packages for most popular 
systems now, and these are statically linked against LLVM. All other 
dependencies (basically, just the C library, libgmp and readline) are 
readily available on most systems.

Cheers,
Albert

-- 
Dr. Albert Gr"af
Dept. of Music-Informatics, University of Mainz, Germany
Email:  Dr....@t-..., ag...@mu...
WWW:    http://www.musikinformatik.uni-mainz.de/ag