rhai-sci-repl ?

[standarddeviant]

This library looks great! I was using rhai-repl and would really like to use rhai-repl with rhai-sci loaded.

Is there an easy way to do that?

[schungx]

The sources with rhai-repl is included. So you can just clone it, load SciPackage into engine, and Bob's your uncle!

[cmccomb]

Will close this issue for now but please let us know if you run into issues loading rhai-sci in rhai-repl!

[standarddeviant]

I appreciate the responses. And that makes sense regarding cloning and modifying. Closing the issue also makes sense to me.

I'm interested in using rust more in scientific contexts. I think rhai-repl with rhai-sci could be make rust more accessible to people more familiar with MATLAB.

Would there be long term interest in adding a command line option to rhai-repl to automatically load rhai-sci to the engine when it starts?

[cmccomb]

Interesting idea! I'll defer to @schungx on that one though.

[schungx]

I can potentially add a number of new feature flags that will load different packages, such as bin-sci to load rhai-sci into rhai-repl and rhai-run...

And the main bin-features feature will automatically load all of them ...

[standarddeviant]

I think that would be interesting to prototype and see how it works.

Regarding loading rhai-sci into rhai-repl on my local machine, I ran into what seems like a simple issue.

When I add the line rhai-sci = { version = "0.2.0" } to Cargo.toml and the following lines to rhai_repl.rs

use rhai_sci::SciPackage;
...
    // right after let mut engine = Engine::new();
    engine.register_global_module(SciPackage::new().as_shared_module());

And then I run: cargo install --path . --bins --features bin-features

I see this output:

$ cargo install --path . --bins --features bin-features
  Installing rhai v1.16.0 (C:\Users\davec\rust\rhai)
    Updating git repository `https://github.com/schungx/rustyline`
    Updating crates.io index
    Blocking waiting for file lock on package cache
error: failed to compile `rhai v1.16.0 (C:\Users\davec\rust\rhai)`, intermediate artifacts can be found at `C:\Users\davec\rust\rhai\target`

Caused by:
  There are multiple `rhai` packages in your project, and the specification `rhai` is ambiguous.
  Please re-run this command with `-p <spec>` where `<spec>` is one of the following:
    rhai@1.15.1
    rhai@1.16.0

I tried adding the -p rhai@1.15.1 after cargo install, but that didn't work. Is it clear what I'm missing or need to reconfigure?

[schungx]

Well, since you are actually compiling Rhai itself ( rhai-repl is a part of it), you cannot use crates that also depend on Rhai unless you specifically patch it in your cargo.toml.

I suggest making a new repo, just copy rhai-repl into it as a standalone project.

[standarddeviant]

That makes sense - I'll try that. Thank you for the reply!

[standarddeviant]

@schungx @cmccomb I have a prototype that I've put here for now: https://github.com/standarddeviant/rhai-sci-repl/tree/main

I'm relatively new to rust and cargo, so I still have a lot to learn. I welcome any suggestions - especially things I may have overlooked as a rust/cargo novice.

Is there a natural place to change how multi-dimensional arrays (i.e. arrays of arrays) are printed? I'd like to print 2D matrices in a pretty way.

I'm trying out reedline instead of rustyline because reedline seems 'fancier out of the box' and I'm interested in fancy features (like hints, tab-complete, highlighting) longer term to have an experience somewhat similar to the IPython REPL. I plan to add various features there over time such as

• pretty matrix printing
• variable/field tab complete - (combining scope and reedline completer?)
• common file system commands like ls, pwd, cd, etc.

[schungx]

Yes, when repl was written, reedline was not yet for production and the API was still in flux, so I stayed with rustyline instead.

You're welcome to move it to reedline and then contribute a PR back!

BTW, see if reedline enables bracketed-paste on Windows by default... rustyline doesn't so I had to spin my own...