Re: rx and ctax

[Andrew Archibald <aarchiba@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca>]

; Can anybody help me on installing and using rx and ctax?

Um.  That's not so easy.  It has bitrotted quite a lot.  I took a look
at it, and have a hacked-up version sitting on my machine.  I was
waiting until I could package it nicely to post it, but as I really
don't know how to do that...

; I mangaged to compile the rx library after changing 
;     scm_gen_puts (scm_regular_string, ...);
; to
;     scm_puts ( ... );
; and moving the rx directory into the core-distribution directory.

That's one solution.  A better way (what I did) is to hack around with
it until you can construct a shared library suitable for run-time
dynamic linking.  This isn't too too painful if you have automake,
autoconf and libtool. 

; After installing I get a static and a shared library but no
; .scm modules. 
; Is the shared lib intended for dynamic linking? If not Do I have to
; build a new guile on my own or is there an option in the
; core-distrib.? 
; I it is supposed tbe linked dynamically, what is the exact procedure
; to link and initialize it?

If it's set up right internally there will be a function with a name
like scm_lang_rx_module which calls 
scm_register_module_xxx("lang rx",some_other_function); 
Then this shared library should go in %load-path/lang/librx.la.  Then
to use it, do (use-modules (lang rx)) and if you got the part with the
goat right, it will load. 

; I also have problems using the ctax-modules (but this may be a
; consequence of the rx-problem)

There are a few problems with these.  They are seriously out of date
wrt modules, keywords and miscellaneous guile stuff.  Further, some of
the libs they depend on in ice-9 are broken (lineio, for example).

; Thanks for any help, 
; 			Alex

Anyway, to summarize: a lot of pain was involved in getting them to
work; I have them working, but it required me to manually symlink some
files, so it's not ready for prime time.  But if you're willing to
hack around a bit, I can upload them to the guile site.  Hopefully you
can do a better job of getting them working than I; they're pretty
slow on my 386. 

I'd love to have a usable ctax repl.  If a language wizard were to
hack ctax so you could end commands with a newline instead of a
semicolon, it would be great.

Andrew
aarchiba@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca
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