Ok, I've got annotations working, with annotate, type and rep tuned to make everything work. Displaying annotated data gives the same output as canonical Arc.
pr also displays lists the same way as canonical Arc : instead of
(foo . (bar . (baz . nil)))
it displays
(foo bar baz)
And
(foo . (bar . baz))
is displayed
(foo bar . baz)
I'm fighting with strings now. I can display individual characters, as long as they are regular ASCII characters. A character is only a Unicode codepoint, encoded as a long. A string is internally an array of codepoints, so it occupies a lot of space, as each character uses 8 bytes. But accessing / modifying characters is fast & easy. When output, strings are converted to UTF-8 (that's where it does not work anymore :).
Edit : it now works, as long as you only use ASCII characters, which is, I admit it, rather stupid, but I had to do that first. And the len primitive is now implemented and works on cons cells and strings.
Re: symbols - perhaps it's better to leave them in UTF-8, then only convert them to UTF-32 if and only if they are coerced to strings.
I suggest making tables work first before the really weird numbers ^^
Edit: there's also the problem of making I/O ports redirect to strings under construction. 'tostring is pretty much the idiomatic way of creating strings in Arc.
Edit2: As an aside, here's what I intend to do with ac.scm built-ins:
1) Remove ac.scm xdef'ed functions from the mac* stuff in xe.arc
2) Create a special lib-ac.scm.arc, where we can access primitives:
(set car
(fn (x)
(%car x))) ;will access primitive %car, but only in lib-ac.scm.arc
Code that isn't in lib-ac.scm.arc will not be able to access the primitives %foo.
The above will of course allow code like:
(map car (pair lst))
3) Finish up my inliner, so that user code of the form:
Yep. I left symbols encoded in UTF-8. When a string is output to anything (included when transformed to a symbol) it is translated to UTF-8. And I was planning to implement tables before the numeric tower. I think there's more fun in tables rather than in numbers :)
Just a question, but I wonder if you could give eds write access to the repo? And of course, if there's anyone else out there who would like to contribute, just let us know, I think sacado would be glad to accommodate you ^^
I'd like to have access too. Currently I don't have much free time to contribute, but if I find some time i'll be glad to contribute. My github username is, surprisingly, 'stefano'.
