Re: occam REPL

[Allan McInnes <amcinnes@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Quoting tjoccam@xxxxxxxxxxx:
>
> Does anyone have the official, agreed-upon specs for the behavior
> of a REPL?

I would be very surprised if such a thing existed. The basic concept of a
read-eval-print loop is exactly what it sounds like: read an expression,
evaluate it, and print the result. But the details of how the evaluation takes
place, and what additional features the REPL shell provides, tend to vary from
language to language.

> Just turn it into an occam harness, in which the incomplete
> process network can be inserted. I'd consider working on it myself...

I'm not entirely convinced that a REPL-style interface would be the best way to
get people playing with process-oriented programming (which seems to be your
goal). Wiring up incomplete process networks, and adding to them on-the-fly,
seems to me like something that would be difficult to achieve via a textual
interface. Not impossible, but potentially difficult enough that it would not
have the desired effect of stimulating experimentation. My suggestion would be
to provide some kind of graphical interface for defining process networks
interactively. Something like Simulink for Matlab. Perhaps the work by
Hilderink and his colleagues on gCSP would provide a good starting point.

Allan
-- 
Allan McInnes <amcinnes@xxxxxxxxxx>
PhD Candidate
Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Utah State University