It would be nice to have the ability to run a system as a commandline command - or even as the shell. We have plenty of options for ways to achieve that.
This issue is a brief explanation of one use case showing what would be wanted.
Background: an online discussion about how to calculate the 4784969th fibonacci number using various languages. Obviously most languages were dead-text languages where one would simply in a command shell run
myLanguageThing fibonacciCalc.myLanguageExtension
or similar. Much debate about implementations of effective fibonacci calculations ensued, some of it very interesting ( See https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=62&t=227343 later pages around 70+ for example) but with a great deal of ridicule of Smalltalk once I joined the discussion; some people really don't like the idea of not-dead-text-files. I did eventually start to persuade them somewhat though.
So to try to illustrate things in Smalltalk I produced a simple cs file to implement a fast fibonacci, run it, time it, print the answer(s) to stdout and quit.
Several interesting issues came up
one person was using gnu smalltalk, which is old, out of date, non-standard and buggy
on Windows I couldn't get the stdout etc file handles to work at all dspite the code appearing to be in the vm
on ubuntu-x86 I had to preface the fibonacci stuff with'FileStream startUp: ture' to force the stdout stuff to actually initalise and work; no need on my Pi, rather oddly
the readStartupDocuments method is run after all the startup is completed and the UI up. I'd much prefer to be able to run things before any UI is opened (and the VM changes to not open a window until it is actually required should be done)
One intersting option that might be useful is to
include Dave Lewis' ExternalCommandShell (or simialr) in the normal image
support a commandline option something like '-cli' that would stop the startup sequence before any UI is initialised, but would then start the external shell stuff
It would be nice to have the ability to run a system as a commandline command - or even as the shell. We have plenty of options for ways to achieve that. This issue is a brief explanation of one use case showing what would be wanted.
Background: an online discussion about how to calculate the 4784969th fibonacci number using various languages. Obviously most languages were dead-text languages where one would simply in a command shell run
myLanguageThing fibonacciCalc.myLanguageExtensionor similar. Much debate about implementations of effective fibonacci calculations ensued, some of it very interesting ( See https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=62&t=227343 later pages around 70+ for example) but with a great deal of ridicule of Smalltalk once I joined the discussion; some people really don't like the idea of not-dead-text-files. I did eventually start to persuade them somewhat though. So to try to illustrate things in Smalltalk I produced a simple cs file to implement a fast fibonacci, run it, time it, print the answer(s) to stdout and quit.Several interesting issues came up
One intersting option that might be useful is to