New to the Cobra

[Charles]

charles:

some miscellaneous comments, in no particular order...

1) is it possible for these discussion threads to be presented in reverse order, with the most recent "reply" showing first, rather than last? it's a pain to have to manually select the last page of the conversation thread in order to read the most recent comment.

I don't think it's possible, but there is a helpful link called "First unread post". It's on the right and when you click it, you will jump to the first new post that you haven't read.

I didn't notice this link for a long, long time even though I use a similar link on another discussion forum. So I think it's placement must be bad. We'll see about getting it on the left hand side instead of the right.

Anyway, that link will save you time.

2) similarly, is it possible to have the overall list of discussion topics presented in reverse date (of most recent reply or posting) order, instead of statically in their assigned order, so that recent posts bubble to the top of the list so that reader's can simply check the top of the list if they want to see activity on the board?

They are, but it might not look like it at first glance because I made the surveys "sticky" for 30 days which keeps them at the top. After the sticky period, they will fall off. Everything after the surveys should, in fact, be in "most recent" order. Also, you should also see an icon next to any thread you haven't completely read. Make sure you're signed in even for reading, in order to get that feature.

3) i've been reading the cobra tutorial, in order, and love the language and completely grasp that you're an ergonomics fanatic and that any rational programmer should probably favor cobra as his/her general development language. i'd guess that the main obstacle to radically increasing cobra popularity, is the lack of complete support for it by at least one of the popular IDEs. easy for me to say that, because i'm frankly not competent enough as a programmer to step up to the plate and help you accomplish that task.

I agree that full IDE support would boost Cobra's popularity. I think the JVM back-end, once mature, will as well. Having both would be a game changer. We'll get there eventually, but complex projects "sponsored" by free time can move slowly.

4) i was surprised to read about cobra's multiple assignment feature. do any of the C variants or other popular gen'l development langs do that? i don't remember ever seeing it before. it's amazingly elegant that the cobra compiler not only allows multiple assignments to be done on one line for the sake of code brevity, but also assign them all simultaneously, rather than left-to-right sequentially. this is really a clever insight into how to offload work (and specifically, to entirely avoid the manual creation of some awkward temporary variables) from the programmer onto the compiler. which lang did you borrow this idea from, please? just curious.

This comes straight out of Python although I don't know if Python originated it or not. For example, Python's use of indentation for code blocks comes from ABC. I believe Perl and Ruby also support multiple assignment.

5) thanks for this public gift. my intention, if at all possible, is to move my programming life entirely to this new lang and write a comm'l application with it, including targeting iOS. i suspect that if a major coding-intensive company hired you to develop cobra as their in-house programming language, they'd see a return on their investment in coding productivity.

-paul

Sounds great.

-Charles

[DelphiGuy]

i'm interested in learning what the "cue" keyword does. without telling me (there's no point because i'm interested in a zillion keywords), what general procedure should i follow to learn from the reference manual?

i can't find any listing of keywords sorted by category, so i don't which category of the reference manual to be looking in. i also couldn't find any way to search the reference manual for a particular keyword.

on another but related topic, is there a way to print out the entire darned reference manual? i'd like to do so and put it in a 3-ring binder.

thanks.

-paul

[Charles]

At http://cobra-language.com/trac/cobra/wiki you can enter a search term in the upper right hand corner. Although in this case "cue" does not result in a "cue" wiki page.

After that, you can use the same search box in the discussion forum. Although this ends up simply finding lots of posts that happen to use "cue" in the code examples.

Finally, I clicked "Advanced search" in the forums which lead to http://cobra-language.com/forums/search.php where I searched for "cue", but checked off "Topic titles only". This leads to a better search result: Cues

What really bothers me in all of this is that there is a wiki page on cues called "Cue":
http://cobra-language.com/trac/cobra/wiki/Cue
... but it did not show up at the top of the wiki search results. Grrr.

Also, it was not linked from LanguageTopics or Classes, but I have now corrected that.

Also, if you make a check list out of How to Learn Cobra and run through it all, you will know the language pretty well.

The wiki serves as our reference manual, but there is no convenient way to print it.

[DelphiGuy]

At http://cobra-language.com/trac/cobra/wiki you can enter a search term in the upper left hand corner. Although in this case "cue" does not result in a "cue" wiki page.

you mean "upper right corner"? that's the only place i can find such a field on win 7 running firefox.

What really bothers me in all of this is that there is a wiki page on cues called "Cue":
http://cobra-language.com/trac/cobra/wiki/Cue

i read that page as carefully as i could understand, and i tentatively concluded from your discussion that the keyword "cue" should ideally be replaced by "def" because, in the spirit of cobra the compiler (not the programmer) should be left to figure out that there is something special about those particular defs. however, since there are some special circumstances that interfere with the compiler figuring it out, unfortunately that leads to some "defs" needing to be replaced with a different keyword.

did i understand this correctly? if so, since for various reasons those defs are "special", it seems to me that the keyword should be "special".

in my view, "cue" is potentially misleading and not as functional a word as it could possibly be, because all keywords are a cue to the compiler, not just special "defs". therefore, using the word "cue" does nothing to help the programmer or the reader of code to understand that it's really a def, and that there is something "special" about these particular defs, that is worthy of "special" attention by the programmer/compiler. "sdef" (special def) would be even better, but arguably the cryptic quality of the "s" would violate the expressive nature of cobra. or "specialdef", but that would violate the "less is more" concise syntax philosophy of cobra.

if instead, the word was "special" or some synonym of "special", than i as an idiot beginner would have at least known that something "special" was going on worthy of research.

The wiki serves as our reference manual, but there is no convenient way to print it.

[/quote]

it's a small point, but http://cobra-language.com/docs/ defines the cobra "reference manual" as "language topics" ( http://cobra-language.com/trac/cobra/wiki/LanguageTopics, which is a child of the wiki heirarchy). in contrast, your sentence quoted above defines "reference manual" as "The wiki" ( http://cobra-language.com/trac/cobra/wiki, which is at the very top of the wiki heirarchy).

thanks for your lengthy explanation of how to research keywords.

-paul

[Charles]

Yes, I meant "upper right" regarding the search box. I have corrected the post for the benefit of future readers.

You say that "all keywords are a cue to the compiler", but what I was really thinking was that these are cues to the object. For example, in using the definition "cue: a thing said or done that serves as a signal to an actor or other performer to enter or to begin their speech or performance", the "actor" is not the compiler, it is the object at run-time.

Things like "cue" and "def" and "class" are declarations that the compiler processes.

I know how you got the wrong idea, though. The wiki page said it! I wrote the original forum post, but not the wiki page. I'll make some edits to clear things up.

Re: manual, yes I guess we could call the wiki, "the manual" and the LanguageTopics page the closest thing to a "reference manual" which would be a subset of "the manual". Or maybe it's more accurate to say that we don't have a traditional manual. Instead, we have documentation in the form of a wiki, samples, how-to's and to a lesser degree, past forum posts.

Thanks for the comments.

[DelphiGuy]

(charles wrote): I agree that full IDE support would boost Cobra's popularity. I think the JVM back-end, once mature, will as well. Having both would be a game changer. We'll get there eventually, but complex projects "sponsored" by free time can move slowly.

charles, i have very little knowledge of the marketing realities, but it seems to me that the biggest game changer would be be getting complete integration with monodevelop, which is free. remobjects and ultimately embarcadero had an entire cross-platform business line going based on delphi prism being well-integrated with monodevelop. and although embarcadero is pushing their own non-.net cross-platform ("firemonkey" for delphi and C++) library and tool these days, i believe they're still supporting delphi prism running on monodevelop. i have a pre-firemonkey copy of delphi prism around here somewhere.

i'm not sure what the current status of monodevelop is, though. xamarin.com is putting a decent amount of work into it, at least i gather so from their website's blog.

http://blog.xamarin.com/2012/04/03/monodevelop-updates/

but i don't really understand the mechanics of their stewardship of the mono project, and whether the continuation of monodevelop (and mono!) is dependent on xamarin's profitability.

in any case, with full support for mono, i think you'd have a code base (and GUI tools as well?) that would largely run on iOS and android as well as win, OSX, and whatever else mono may be supporting these days. i see from nosing around the xamarin blog that there's monogame, as well, whatever that is. i don't know if you use monodevelop to write for that, but i'll bet you do. sure, if you wanted real full support for cobra to be a one-stop shop for getting mono-based mobile apps written, you'd probably have to do a fair amount of add'l work over just supporting monodevelop alone, but who needs all that? i'm planning to write my app's engine in cobra, and since cobra will play nice with C#, i'll just go to C# as necessary for GUI and other monotouch/iOS API issues.

anyway, as i told you: i'm a really bad programmer with limited grasp of technical issues, and my understanding described above is based primarily on fear, superstition and ignorance -- so don't count on my rumor-mongering without checking it out for yourself. but with real monodevelop support it seems to me you'd have quite a bit more exposure.

http://monodevelop.com/Developers/Articles/Language_Addins

-paul

[Charles]

I'm 100% in agreement with your comments. MonoDevelop would be great because it runs on the three big platforms: Windows, Mac and Linux. We need a volunteer though. My free time is consumed by forums, patches, fixes, compiler work and releases.

The Visual Studio add-on could probably also use more regular attention.

[DelphiGuy]

hey, i'll volunteer. the problem is that i'm a programming idiot. i wouldn't be able to understand difficult concepts. on the other hand, if there's something tedious to do that you could supervise me in getting started, i'm very detail-oriented (though i guess all programmers are to some extent), and once started, could probably complete it. in the last email, i sent you the roadmap from monodevelop on how to do a language add-in. reading through the roadmap, i had almost no understanding of what the nomenclature meant. nor could i get my mind even around the most simple overview of the scheme. e.g., what does it mean to "register" the various add-in components with monodevelop? and once things are "registered", will xamarin really allow another language to appear on the monodevelop menu choice to start a new project? why would they do this, if they're not personally making sure that the work we do on our end is robust? and why would they want to pay manpower to look over what we're doing?

these are all rhetorical questions at the moment, to give you a feel for how little i can currently grasp even the beginning of the project.

-paul

[Charles]

I realized from your earlier comments that you weren't prepared to do this. I mentioned needing a volunteer because there are other people who read these forums, too.

Regarding how to do a mono add-in, there are other add-ins for other languages like VB. I think even C# is done as an add-in. So you would look through the code for those to determine what calls to make. Not that this is an easy project, or I would have done it already. But it's doable for advanced developers.

Regarding whether or not it will actually work, yes, it will. Mono and MonoDevelop are both multi-language. The Mono project doesn't monitor the quality of add-ins, but they don't need to since they don't advertise any guarantees about add-ins that they did not create.

[DelphiGuy]

paul asked: 1) is it possible for these discussion threads to be presented in reverse order, with the most recent "reply" showing first, rather than last? it's a pain to have to manually select the last page of the conversation thread in order to read the most recent comment.

charles replied: I don't think it's possible, but there is a helpful link called "First unread post". It's on the right and when you click it, you will jump to the first new post that you haven't read.

yup, it's definitely possible. i set the user profile to do it, and now the moment i log in the message order of any given discussion topic magically reverses and appears in descending order by date. i don't know if you can set that as the default -- i can't imagine any user, superficial guest or fanatical member, who would want the messages in ascending date order.