First cut at a Slate tutorial

[Brian T Rice]

I've read it now, and still think it's really good (and nicely thorough;
I don't have enough patience to write out all those instructions). My main
suggestion is just to run an English spell-checking program over it to fix
up small spelling mistakes. The section on lookup is understandably the
most difficult to write. That's probably worth going back to after you've
handled the other topics, to see if there's a better way to work out the
explanation. The diagrams are sure to help a lot; make sure you use a
decent tool for them. I use xfig for the manual's drawings, but those are
really simple. I've also used Dia for UML/database schema drawings. Maybe
someone out there with free time and drawing skills can assist?

I guess I should emphasize how helpful it is to explain why Slate is
implemented in Lisp (since it is so troublesome to deal with). I suppose
you could be more specific about what features are CLISP-specific: they
are sockets and OS-shell support.  Although saving the image with
saveImageNamed: is clisp-specific in 0.2, the -current version has a
well-ported implementation. Also, Allegro CL, Lispworks, and GCL are the
only (modern) Lisp implementations we do no testing on.

The installation instructions are definitely better than I've written
before, so maybe we should have these placed somewhere prominent. Does the
swiki or the main page seem like the best idea?

On Sun, 21 Dec 2003, Brian T Rice wrote:

> Excellent! I shall read through this today, and at least provide any
> corrections or such as I can. Unfortunately, I am the /last/ person to ask
> about making sure that it is sensible to newcomers. :)
>
> On Sun, 21 Dec 2003, Nicolas Pelletier wrote:
>
> > Hello,
> >
> > the beginning of a Slate tutorial is available at:
> >
> > http://perso.wanadoo.fr/kodama
> >
> > Comments, suggestions, advice are all welcome :-)

-- 
Brian T. Rice
LOGOS Research and Development
http://tunes.org/~water/