🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <CIMSHOP!DAVIDM.90Nov18152138@uunet.UU.NET> cimshop!davidm@uunet.UU.NET (David S. Masterson) writes:

   Perhaps an alternative suggestion to an AREXX command standard would be a
   single command by which AREXX could ask the program in question what its
   command equivalents for the AREXX standard would be.  The result of such a
   command would be a list that's indexed by the standard commands.  Scripts
   desiring to be standard would work indirectly off this list whereas people not
   up to standardization yet would use the program's internal commands directly
   (because those are the one's they would most like learn first).

   This is a neophyte suggestion, so does this make sense?

Yes, it does make sense. For sufficiently simple commands.

Remember, commands are the _easy_ half of doing an ARexx design for an
application. You have to decide what objects you're going to let the
user manipulate, and how those objects are going to be represented to
the Rexx script. After all, it's tweaking the text in the editor
that's what makes Rexx scripts entertaining.

Let's take simple example: copying a region of text from one place to
another. What's involved?

Selecting the source region. How does your editor select a single
point in the text?  Line/offset pairs? Offset into the entire text? By
searching for it? How is the region represented? Two points? Point +
length? Does length include newlines?

Repeat much of this for selecting the insertion point.

Now, creating a copy of the text to be copied. Do we need to store an
intermediate somewhere? Does the editor provide a place for it? Does
using that place destroy what was in it before? Can we use the system
clipboard? Does the Rexx script have to copy the data?

Now, insert the text. Can I just do a single command to insert the
text in place, or do I need a loop of some kind? Do I need to position
the cursor first? Does where the cursor is afterwards matter?

Finally, delete the text you started with. Assuming you have to.

You don't want to use only "incredibly simple" commands. That will
leave the script writers doing everything in ARexx, which will be a
performance hit when the editor can do it all at once. With that in
mind, I suspect the correct thing to do is define a hi-level language
for doing things that avoids things hard to do from a Rexx script, and
then let editor authors provide a macro package to deal with this.

Of course, if part of the command interface is that "macros can be
invoked as commands", mg will never support it well.

	<mike
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