q-lang-users

[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pretty much been superseded by Pure now.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.

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 pretty much been superseded by Pure now.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

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

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

> Rob Hubbard wrote:
>> 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.

Silly, I had those environment variables configured for the user 
environment. I fixed this now. I also added a warning message to the 
interactive startup if the prelude isn't found, which instructs the user 
to check the PURELIB variable. This will in the forthcoming 0.6 release.

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

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

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

> Rob Hubbard wrote:
>> I had been eagerly anticipating QCalc for Windoze, wondering whether 
>> that has essentially been shelved now.
> 
> This will happen at some point.

For the time being, I did a quick-and-dirty hack on Qpad to make it work 
with Pure. "PurePad" will also be included in the 0.6 release for Windows.

-- 
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