woups, language error

[rouaix@sylvaner.inria.fr]

Apologies for posting in french. Let's try again in English.


Following the availability of version 1.2, I resumed working with
Centaur. Here is a list of comments, questions, and maybe bug reports.

1) tvtwm failures : it seems that nobody else had this problem, but
nevertheless, you should know about it. The bug can be reproduce very
easily in my configuration (xnews server, tvtwm pl6) : I start an
Editor, select Read and type a filename with an unknown suffix. The
creation of the dialog box for choosing the Language crashes tvtwm.
(I patched tvtwm for this problem, without any understanding of the
reasons)

2) Suffixes: I'd like to be able to specify difference suffixes for a
given language. For example, in Caml-Light/Alcool, we have files
ending in .ml for the code, and files in .mli for interfaces of
modules. I guess this happens in other cases (LL with .ll and .LM, 
C with .c and .h,...). There is a bad hack that makes it possible with
the current implementation of the VTP, but I'd like an official
method. Moreover, it could be useful to be able to specify an
(optional) parser entry point for such or such suffix.

3) Bug METAL/Compile Abstract : does not save the tables where it is
supposed to (according to me, given the resources).

4) Buildfiles for Metal : in the case of a small formalism without
concrete syntax, I tried to define a Buildfile yacc is not called,
but I failed. NOYACC does not seem to work. Here it is:

ROOTDIR=/home/sylvaner/distrib1.2/
USERDIR=/home/beaune/croap/rouaix/

all : allcmplc subdirs allmetal  

LANGUAGE=FILES
NOLEX=
NOYACC=

#include /home/sylvaner/distrib1.2/centaur/tables/metal/Buildmetal

LANGDIR=./
MODNAME=tables/FILES
PPRINTER=std
PPMLOPTIONS='module

#include /home/sylvaner/distrib1.2/centaur/tables/ppml/BuildppmlLM

SUBDIRS=env

#include /home/sylvaner/distrib1.2/tools/Buildsubdirs


5) Pprinters configuration: I'd like to have, for a given ppml code,
several pprinters that differ only by the choice of colors (that is
the resources for classes of tokens). The naive approach (see below)
does not seem to work (fallback to generic pprinter). It is desperate ?

** in .../pprinters.rdb
Centaur.ALCOOL.ppml.std.Database.UserDefaults: Alcool/centaur/pprinters/std/std.rdb
Centaur.ALCOOL.ppml.test.Database.UserDefaults: Alcool/centaur/pprinters/test/test.rdb

** in .../std/std.rdb
Centaur.ALCOOL.ppml.std.Location: Alcool/centaur/pprinters/std
+ some colors

** in .../test/test.rdb
Centaur.ALCOOL.ppml.test.Location: Alcool/centaur/pprinters/std
+ other colors

6) Read/Parse Functions : in the good ol' time, "hand parsing" of a
file would be easily obtained by calling #:inter:load-or-parse-file.
Nowadays, in the new architectuer, a more powerful incantation is
required to correctly launch the parser servers. 
Can we have such a function ?


That's it for a start.
And bravo to the Centaur team. Version 1.2 is great !

--
Francois Rouaix                         Projet Chloe - INRIA Rocquencourt
rouaix@margaux.inria.fr