Rendezvous, event loops, and why I need SDK docs

[xbury.cs at clearstream.com]

On 12/11/2003 07:18:29 use-revolution-bounces wrote:
>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.

Well, there are some XCMD tutorials spread out on the net AND in the
old HyperCard books with examples in pascal of all things. It's been 
quite discouraging to say the least. 

>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.

I agree. Porting a really stupid Neural Network to external proved to be
prohibitive in time and effort and head-aches compared to doing a shell
executable... What the farg? This is supposed to be an easy and carefree
development environment! 

>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'll see if I can scan the HC book's examples for you...

>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.

A good start is a good start! ;)


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