Re: Drone (was Re: ObjectLoader & batch processing)

[Manor Askenazi]

Y'all,

> On a related topic, I think there was some discussion a while ago about 
> more general scripting.  If you'd like to build a completely general 
> scripting language into your Swarm application, so that you can control 
> every aspect of the program using a script, I'd recommend taking a look at 
> Tcl...

This was the original plan... However, some pilot tests conducted by
Ginger showed that dynamic calls involving doubles and floats weren't
working correctly, i.e. the following was not possible:

InitScript.tcl:

  [MyMainSwarm setHeat: 0.789] ;

This was not surprising because __builtin_apply() wasn't working properly 
and libtclObjc depended on it.

Now, there has been an announcement of an upgrade to gcc which may have 
solved this problem so that we could perhaps get back on track for using
tcl as the scripting approach for Swarm. A really cool example of this
can be found at:

  http://www-sfb288.math.tu-berlin.de/oorange/Oorange.html

As far as I understood the Oorange group were able to proceed completely
with interpreted Objective-C because they were running on 1-2 architectures.
But due to the announcement of gcc-2.7.2.1-objc-960906 there may be a way to 
proceed on this and do the double stuff and do it on any architecture.

In the meanwhile I made the horrendous blunder of proposing an interim
solution which stinks because y'all want to do much more than just the
equivalent of typing into a probe: you want to set structs arrays etc.
save arrays etc. etc.

For the record, if we do have a cool scripting language, how would that 
mesh in with the DRONE stuff? 

Regards,

Manor.

PS> We may be losing an opportunity to design all of this cleanly into
    Swarm, but the prime imperative here is to provide solutions today
    to whoever is doing batch-stuff (that includes me as a user :-)
    So, I for one will take whatever works!!!