Writing Extensions

[Mark Waddingham]

On 2017-05-17 23:43, Mark Wieder via use-livecode wrote:
> Yes. In fact it's the areas where they differ that make for a
> difficult learning curve. There are features in LCB that I wish were
> backported to LCS. I appreciate the team's reticence to make syntax
> changes to the core xtalk language, but even as a long-time C
> programmer,
> 
> put tHexNumber converted from base 16 into tDecimalNumber
> 
> seems so much more readable than
> 
> put format("%02x", tHexNumber) into tDecimalNumber

I wouldn't say we have a 'reticence' to make syntax changes but it 
requires
a great deal more care than in LCB for several reasons:

    - The current implementation of LCS has no notion of versioning for 
its
      syntax or semantics - so every change to syntax / addition has to 
be done
      in a way which will not break user scripts.

    - All the syntax in the engine is done using hand-coded parsing - it 
is very
      easy to introduce unintended ambiguities and syntactic forms which 
we did
      not intend.

    - It is quite labour intensive to add / change syntax which means 
experimenting
      with it (which you need to do to get it 'just right') is hugely 
costly.

In contrast, all of LCB's syntax (beyond the core control structures and 
definiton
structures) is defined in LCB itself, and binds direct to handlers which 
implement
that syntax (in contrast, in LCS, you have to write C++ code both to 
parse a piece
of syntax, and to dispatch it to the implementation). For example, the 
syntax you
mention above is defined like this:

syntax BaseConvert is left binary operator with conversion precedence
     <Operand: Expression> "converted" "from" "base" <Source: Expression> 
"to" "base" <Target: Expression>
begin
     MCMathEvalConvertBase(Operand, Source, Target, output)
end syntax

With 'MCMathEvalConvertBase' being a (foreign) handler implemented in 
C++ which performs
the action of the syntax.

The main limitation with LCB's syntax right now is that it has to be 
compiled into
a parser spec ahead of time - i.e. at creation of the lc-compile tool - 
but even with
that restriction, 'playing' with syntax is possible by just a tweak to a 
code file and a click of
a button (albeit in a native code IDE), rather than spending many hours 
hand modifying
some rather old (and in some places very complex) C++ code.

Of course, one valid retort here would be - then why don't you just make 
it easier to
do this by changing how the engine works in this regard? And the simple 
answer is that
we are - in order to do that we need an architecture and method of doing 
so, and LCB is
that architecture.

Warmest Regards,

Mark.

-- 
Mark Waddingham ~ mark at livecode.com ~ http://www.livecode.com/
LiveCode: Everyone can create apps