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| Date: | -- (:) |
| From: | Andrej Bauer <Andrej.Bauer@a...> |
| Subject: | Toplevel wishlist |
Thank you for suggestions on how to tweak custom toplevels. For a while now I have been thinking that there should be a fancy alternative to the current toplevel. If I had the time, I would actually go ahead and try to write one. But what would be a good feature list? I can think of several improvements: 1) First, provide not only a toplevel but also a library that others could use to make toplevel-like interfaces to ocaml bytecode engine. 2) Do not hardcode stdin/stdout communication into toplevel. Instead, have a toplevel that communicates with the outside in a more abstract way. Thus it should be relatively easy to create toplevels that are equipped with line editing, that communicate through a graphical user interface (in a natural way), that talk via Texmacs, etc. 3) Equip toplevel with pretty printers that can manage polymorphic types, and essentially make it possible to pretty print _everything_. It should be possible to create a toplevel linked to a graphical user interface that shows pictures and typeset text as results. 4) Provide reasonable configuration options that allow one to customize the toplevel in a sensible way (such as pre-installed pretty printers and pre-open modules). Reading stuff _only_ from .ocamlinit is not fancy enough. What else can we put on the wishlist? If only someone else did it :-) Andrej