Dev refman

[tajmone]

[manual] Part I. Chs. 2-4

• Port and polish chapters 2-4 of Part I:
  • Ch. 2. System Description
  • Ch. 3. A ToolMaker Based System
  • Ch. 4. The ToolMaker Description File
• New docs-src/ref-man/images/ folder with temporary version of Fig.1 (Gif from scanned image).
• Rake: Add images/*.gif to Ref Man prerequisites.
• Add to OCR temporary text file all the missing even pages in the range 134-156.

[thoni56]

Just incredible progress, @tajmone !

[tajmone]

Just incredible progress, @tajmone !

I'm really enjoying this, it gives me the opportunity to learn more about the tools behind the ALAN compiler. And also I'm starting to see the similarities in design between ToolMaker and ALAN, and how the former influenced the latter in many respects (e.g. the semantics of Options, to mention one).

I'm also wondering whether IMP could be used as a preprocessor for the library projects, e.g. to handle conditional code blocks for optional modules. It seems a powerful tool, and might be used along with a Library Wizard GUI to customize the base library by including or excluding specific features.

Since library features rely on classes and/or attributes, the challenge is conditionally handling WHERE and CHECK blocks based on whether a given feature (e.g. clothing, dialogs, etc.) is being included or not.

Surely, there are tons of FOSS macro processors available in the wild, but IMP seems a natural fit for ALAN because of its deep connections between their syntaxes and design.