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Three Tools

The Glish language, and especially its ability to be easily extended with Glish Clients and distributed objects (usally written in C++ with the AIPS++ classes) - these are the backbone of the aips++ user environment. But they must be accompanied by some tools so that programmability and transparency are as good as they can be. There are three tools we need right away:

1. Transparency Tool. This only needs to work at the level of Glish functions - there is no need to interactively expand or decompose the objects and member functions of compiled code. This tool would take a single argument - the name of a Glish function - and would return a nicely formatted version of the functions text. Further decomposition could be achieved by calling the tool on a function which appeared in the first decomposition. (We may need to promote a style of Glish/Tk programming in which every gui action resolves to a single function call, so that decomposition of a gui action could easily achieved by the transparency tool as well.) It should be possible to redirect the function listing to the Glish tty, to a Tk edit buffer widget, or to a named file.

2. Evaluation Tool. We need a text editing buffer, probably a Tk text widget, from which text will be sent to the Glish interpreter. We should be able to send selected text, the whole buffer, or the function in which the cursor is currently located.

3. Online, context-sensitive help. Please see AIPS++ Note 187.