Re: Interactive programming with pengines

Consider that every programmer who uses pengines will go through the learning curve. I think it's important that it work well at the top level.
I'm with Torbjorn on this.

> After all, the idea behind pengines is the same as behind Paul Tarau's
> engines: have a _machine_ interact with Prolog engines. (except that
> Paul's engines are local and aiming at Prolog only interaction where
> yours are either local or remote and aim also at interacting with other
> languages). We already have the toplevel for interacting with users.

I often refer to LSL since it's the only actor language I've programmed in extensively, and it was great fun to program in! In LSL communication among objects is via 'chat' messages - a string emitted on an integer channel.
This was integrated with the acutal user to user 'chat' function. Typing
lines into the chat window as in all ways equivilent to broadcasting 'chat' on channel zero.
One of the great qualities of this was that users could use it directly. Lines like 
/3 some stuff here
were 'chatted' on channel 3. So, for example, if a person had a hat that could pop out a jester on a spring, they'd activate it with /5 jester or whatever.

This game I'm writing now is a nightmare to debug - it's played by running around the OSU campus, which is a 45 minute drive from here, and I'm snowed in. Further, I'm testing on my desktop, not on a mobile device. So I've added lots of debug hooks to let me simulate moving around and so on.

So yup, 'coding at the repl' as tghey say in the Clojure community, is important.


> P.s.    At some point I'd like to launch pengines.swi-prolog.org to
>         run a public demo.  The stuff you created is one.  This would
>         make another nice demo.


I'd offered to make a pengines tutorial. Maybe it should live there?