listSlots = ls

[Brian Rice]

Quoting Ralph Mellor <ral.phatdimp.com at bespin.org>:

> used at a command line interactively, listSlots is 
clearly
> suggestive of ls. have you considered renaming or 
aliasing
> listSlots to ls? and continuing with ls -a, cd, ...?
>
> in the tutorial (http://www.tunes.org/~water/slate-
tutorial.html),
> you say:
>
>     So how do we get back to the playground? Well, 
objects
>     have slots just for this purpose: the '<' slot 
brings up the
>     object's enclosing namespace when invoked. So, 
given the
>     evaluator's state after the above example, if we 
enter:
>
>     myPoint> .
>
> i expected you to say:
>
>     myPoint> <
>
> the specific syntax you use ('.') isn't a problem in 
and of itself,
> but i didn't expect it based on the previous 
paragraph.
>
> i would certainly find any of these especially 
appealing:
>
>     myPoint> /
>
> or
>
>     myPoint> ..
>
> or better still
>
>     myPoint> cd ..

Yes, this will definitely be possible even in a 
moderately-well developed environment. Basically, a lot 
of the issues of user-interface to the language will 
rely on some work I am doing on quotation and syntactic 
abstraction. Basically, you can take the examples I've 
been giving as "raw Slate". In this sense, Slate is 
much more of an object calculus than a full language 
per se.

> i was last able to significantly indulge my love of 
comp
> languages in the late 80s. at the end of that period, 
beta
> and clos were probably my favorite languages. as such,
> it won't come as a surprise that i think you are 
headed
> in the right direction.
>

Okay, thanks.

For the next 7 days I will have to keep my posts short, 
but after that I will have much more to say, and I 
promise much better and updated documentation. The 
ideas for Slate have been developing and accruing 
detail lately, but I have been hesitant to commit some 
of the ideas because of their novelty and lack of 
testing. At any rate, expect a new Slate.lisp sometime 
soon (or perhaps a Slate.st).

Thanks,
~


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