Cobra Q & A

[Charles]

I've been emailing with a new user and some questions came up. I'm posting them here with answers:

> Here are some things that I haven't found so far in Cobra:
>
> * regexp (compare JavaScript)

.NET/Mono library. System.Text.RegularExpressions

> * support for JSON (compare PHP 5.2 ()

Just cranked out by a Cobra community member the other day:
http://bitbucket.org/webnov8/cobson/

> * support for Parsing Expression Grammars (compare REBOL)

Not present. I use a classic hand-coded recursive descent parser for Cobra. You can find it in workspace/Source/CobraParser.cobra. I attempted to push reusable bits up to Parser.cobra, but have not tried it out on other projects.

> * support for (mathematical) matrices (compare MatPy)

I'm sure there will be .NET/Mono libs for this. You might try http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=C%23+matrices and other searches. Cobra can use any library that C# and VB.NET can use.

> * web support (compare curl, wget)

http://cobra-language.com/samples/Download/

Note that most of that code is command line argument handling. Grabbing the contents of a URL is very easy.

> I'm curious about the state of Cobra reference documentation. The "Reference
> Manual" seems to be very rudimentary, and certainly far behind the
> "Additional Cobra Documentation" on Trac. When I installed Cobra
> (Cobra-0.8.0-post) I didn't see any generated documentation. Is this an area
> where you need help?

Yes! I intended to work on the Reference Manual a little bit each week, but it turned out I'm too busy on coding. I think we should move those pages into the wiki. I think "Additional Documentation" is a poor name and we need a little reorg. Maybe something like:

LanguageReference
LibraryGuide -- with topics like read/write files, xml, json, get url contents, etc.
LearningGuide -- show a trail of topics as well as TO DO items to check off like reading each How To, reading each Sample, etc.

Help in this area is greatly appreciated.

-Chuck

[todd.a]

Note that the library is now called Sonny. I decided to remain agnostic as far as project naming goes (no .net, mono, cobra hints). Find it at http://www.bitbucket.org/webnov8/sonny