Re: File editor

On Nov 19, 6:33 am, Konrad Viltersten <t...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I'm very sure that my prior experience with e.g. MatLab
makes me expect things that won't be there. If i see it
correctly now, you're saying that in DAPL, one creates
a reality/world/workspace and forms it after whatever
is needed. The variables and such smply "are in there".

Yes: An APL workspace is like a SpreadSheet: It contains your data and
your code in a single unit which you save together. In fact, it even
saves the "execution state": If you interrupt a function while it is
running and )SAVE the workspace, the execution state and the state of
local variables etc is saved with the workspace - and you can resume
execution after reloading the WS.

As development teams grow (beyond one person), they tend to depart
from the workspace as the storage medium for code, and use files.
Although some tools for this did achieve widespread use on the
mainframe, none of them were appropriate in the workstation world and
today every APL shop more or less has its own home-grown source code
management system.

Data also quickly migrates from the workspace into APL "component
files" or relational databases.

So the workspace is most useful for the single user who is working
with code and data in an exploratory fashion; it provides an extremely
simple way to save everything and continue later. Curiously, it's
usefulness resurfaces with our largest customers: We have people who
run huge batch processes and web servers who tell us that the fact
that APL saves the state when it crashes is the single most valuable
functionality of the APL system: It allows them to )LOAD the crash
workspace, examine the state, manually reconnect to databases and then
single-step through the code, and either rescue the transaction which
was in process, or allow a batch job which had already been running
for hours and received some data in a new unexpected input format to
be completed rather than have to start the nightly batch run all over
again.

The advent of widespread Unicode support in source code management
tools, editors, compare & merge tools, etc means that it is now easy
and rapidly getting more attractive to store APL source code in text
files "just like everyone else". This is the mode which SALT is
promoting. If you look inside the "Classes" folder below the main
Dyalog program folder, you will find examples of APL code saved in
this form.

Morten
.

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