Rendezvous, event loops, and why I need SDK docs

[Alex Rice]

On Nov 11, 2003, at 10:44 PM, MisterX wrote:
> Save often, pick up a good book on C. That C code is hellish! Doing the
> advanced stuff like the Life game or the imagine stuff on the tutorial 
> is
> impressive! But should be easy with practice and time.

Xavier- thanks for the info. I have already studied the externals 
tutorial that comes with metacard. I agree that is the only starting 
point available to us.

But it is definitely not my experience that it becomes easy with 
practice and time. Soon you will find out that externals tutorial is 
poorly commented, and does not even attempt to document the API. Most 
of the code doesn't even have comments. The tutorial is useful for 
seeing some of the possibilities one can do with externals- and that's 
about it.

By imitating the code in external.c I learned enough to write some 
simple commands and functions. So although I have written a useful 
external, there is much I need to learn. And once again I have run into 
this documentation barrier and can learn no more from this meager 
tutorial.

I have written an external for the CLIPS expert system, compiled for 
both OS X and Win32 (using VC++6). You can see it here:
<http://mindlube.com/download/files/runrev/revclips-07-09-03.tar.gz>

revclips is just simple commands and functions. Passing strings back 
and forth between CLIPS and transcript. It does not attempt more 
advanced techniques like array manipulation, image manipulation, 
threading, networking or event loop issues.

Alex Rice <alex at mindlube.com> | Mindlube Software | 
<http://mindlube.com>

what a waste of thumbs that are opposable
to make machines that are disposable  -Ani DiFranco