An eclectic-pencil blog

When getting used to Curl 5.x it may be helpful to remember that when you were 29 in, say, California, you were already 30 in Japan.

When I installed Curl 5.x to my portable I: drive in \Curl RTE it was no longer obvious to me how to launch curl. What works for the IDE for me is

“I:\Curl RTE\Surge\6\bin\surge-do.exe” –ide 0 show-main

But you will find that many Curl pages do not want to execute without installing Curl yet again.
Don’t panic. Once you have Curl 5.x installed, you can safely install Curl 4.x and Curl 3.x

It see what you have installed as RTE’s, bring up the RTE console or Control Panel, which in my case is

“I:\Curl RTE\Surge\6\bin\surge-do.exe” –show-manager

The About Curl tab tells me that while I am at 5.0.2, I am able to support Curl applets running 4.0.4 and 3.0.10

And sure enough, there under the .\surge directory are directories named 4, 5 and 6. If only multiple jave JRE’s were as simple

Of course it is not enough to install the older RTE’s to be able to run your own applets: you still must take a moment to enter privileged directories for This Computer by using the Curl Control Panel’s Security tab.

Now if you start the IDE and create your first project, one little tip. It may not be obvious, but a double click on the component named

vle-container.scurl

opens the visual design tool. Save your work as a somefile.scurl and then place

include “somefile.scurl”

in your start.curl file.

When your first Curl web page comes up, I think you will agree that this is almost as cool as Rebol, I mean Strongtalk, errr, WebClaire … no … Seaside. Right, Seaside! For a few moments there I got de-Railed, so to speak … Not that you would use Rails to build a Pier!

Not to belittle Ruby Gems … nothing could be simpler. And still work. Ah, life without being on the make … configure …

And then there is Ruby RIO. Truly terrific. But who under the Sun would call any component, framework or architecture RIO ? What about IO/2 ? Trazom ? As Rose Latulipe told the judge, “It ain’t just a name!”

Shortly after arriving in El Segundo, CA, a gracious hobby horticulturalist/botanist explained to me that this was not Wonderland: those gorgeous winter blossoms were camelias.

So when I felt that I had given OCAML short shrift, I turned to find an IDE ( you live through CNS pain from an RSI and you may avoid the command line, too ). And there it was: Camelia. And with an MSI file for Windoze. I was set. Beware. They are writing keys in the registry for “Brown CS17″ ( a little Camelia history explains that one ). And naturally enough, no setting of OCAMLLIB in cmd session, bash or Msys would spare me the fatal failure to load

pervasives.cmi

So I thought, this can’t be the only IDE for Ocaml. Quite right. There is Cameleon, now Cameleon2 ( or is that 1.9 ? – could be Japanese-style numbering as with Curl ). I was a little wary because of the list of graphical requirements which vaguely resembled a former ‘harrowing’ when looking into Python graphics. But it will not build. And under Cygwin the silly error is not the same as the sillier error reported by Msys when running

./configure --some-tedious-param=(absolute-path-to-ocaml-compiled-src)

Drat. Back to Camelia. This works, so I offer it up here. It is a Bill-boy Gates-DOS approach, but heck, it works … a camelia.bat file.

@echo off
set PATH=i:\camelia;%PATH%
cd %OCAMLLIB%
i:\camelia\camelia.exe

Which pretty much shows that OCAMLLIB is not the issue here …

If I get to like Camelia and enjoy OCAML then I might make this a vbs script or some variant of a WSH script and get away from the BAT annoyance.

But I have to tell you: if I love camelias, I adore chameleons. You watch a Panther Chameleon stalk a cricket and then langourously unroll that tongue for a sip of water … well, you could be hooked, too.

As much as I like TreePad and even Microscoff OneNote 2003 ( and even really like OneNote 2007), I am in the habit of using Python’s LEO as my freeware outliner (outlining editor).

If you have not started using reST (reStructured Text) then you may owe it to yourself to try Leo.

But if you get hooked and then one day your Leo fails to open or worse, opens a favorite LEO tree empty, do not panic! Here is my tip. Go to the root of the drive on which you run LEO and look for a hidden file named

.leoRecentFiles.txt

Use an reliable editor such as TextPad and remove a few old entries or those which are self-explanatory (my rebol.leo is in my rebol home, naturally.)

Save and restart LEO. Voila!

If you are an XP or Vista user who tries to keep abreast of GNU-type opensource, you may have had the occasional annoyance when trying to use Winzip.

Even if you have configured Winzip not to mess with line endings, it can become baffled.

If you find yourself facing a

somefile.tgz

you may need to try renaming the file to

somefile.tar.gz

The same may apply to the occasional

otherfile.tar.tar

which will behave better when renamed as

otherfile.tar.gz

But what if you unzip and find no directories listed when you know they should be present? Arggh! This is the time to start using gzip and tar, so startup your bash shell.

gzip -d somefile.tar.gz

will extract the tar file

Now be sure to place the newly extracted tar file where you want to build the directory tree.

tar -xf somefile.tar

should do the trick. And you have not become entangled with any other win32 tool that might interfere with your happy use of winzip

And if this works fine, get yourself a copy of bzip2.exe for those occasional BZ2 files.

And decompress now and again!

( But try not to totally decompensate )

Suppose that emacs is not your idea of a Win32 IDE. And you happen not to want to install LispWorks or purchase Allegro. There is always Jabberwocky (actually there is also Smalltalk/X and VistaSmalltalk to play with Lisp, but this is Clisp … or is it?)

If you have already moved to JAVA6, you may give up. But don’t. This can be done.

You need to start the Jabberwocky setup.bat in a cmd session. Then you need to set JAVA_HOME to point to a 1.4.2 SDK with a tools.jar – here we go:

set JAVA_HOME=d:\j2sdk1.4.2_sumpin

set PATH=%JAVA_HOME%\bin;%PATH%

set classpath=%java_home%\lib;%java_home%\jre\lib

set J2D_D3D=false

Now for a test:

java -version

The next thing will be to have a CLISP installed. As I could not get a current CYGWIN to build GNU Clisp, I opted for a binary.

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=1355

But which? One comes with gettext and one comes without. I took both. Now the tricky bit: each Clisp comes with a \base and a \full directory. I chose to try the gettext-version, full variety. This required that when the Jabberwocky setup ran, that I forced it to go into the .\full subdirectory to find

lisp.exe

lispinit.mem

So run the setup, use the browse “..” button to find a lisp.exe in a Clisp subdirectory and if all goes well, your chosen destination will contain a new jar:

Jabberwocky.jar.

Double-click and it should run fine in your otherwise undisturbed java environment.

Remember, the setup will not tolerate clisp.exe; it must dine on lisp.exe

And if the above is in any respect misleading, please comment to correct.

And if you know how to build GNU lisp on a current CYGWIN, maybe you can tip me on how to do the same with GNU Smalltalk.

Btw, GNU Prolog builds like a charm and accepts Logtalk to-boot.

Smalltalk users may want to build Smalltalk/X using Borland Bcc55 and launch

Lisp:LispInterpreter open

But only if they fear the Jabberwocky.

And speaking of fear, beware the old French film, “The Wages of Fear”. Try “An Affair of Love” instead. Or have a Danish; I recommend “Italian For Beginners”. And if you haven’t seen “The Lives of Others” you may be spending too much time watching a CRT or an LCD. Well, in my case, staring.

As for my fave Win32 IDE for a fringe language: LuaEdit. Not JEdit. LuaEdit. Lua, as in luna. Lua, the best thing from Brazil since, well, Jobim and Astrud Gilberto.

As for the other Lisp within Smalltalk, checkout http://www.vistasmalltalk.net which runs both within IE7 or on an XP desktop (with the latest .NET installed.)

Ciao.