Re: non-update of RedyCode
- Posted by petelomax 23 hours ago
- 41 views
A horrible thought occurred to me the other month that as the world embraces ChatGPT/CodePilot/etc, all my efforts to make programming easier fall by the wayside once AI is writing the code, all rather sobering and depressing. But within a week I realised it is quite possibly instead a wonderful opportunity: as programmers switch from writing code to "prompt engineers" and spend significantly more of their time reviewing the code that gets spat out at them, clarity and readability will become even more important. The abject terror of introducing bugs will probably become even more acute, and with luck ChatGPT will prove once and for all that absurd garbage such as the SOLID principles simply do not help at all. What will help is locating bugs quickly, and that is one thing I'm pretty confident Phix is pretty good at. Near-instant paste/run might help too. Nothing guaranteed in this funny old world, of course.
I wasn't shy and made a few suggestions, but there was no response.
I'm always up for any (specific) ways to improve the web site, or docs, or Phix itself. Don't be shy now.
Since you said not to be shy, a few thoughts on the Phix website ...
- The URL http://phix.x10.mx doesn't look very appealing and isn't that easy to remember.
- Even if technically it's irrelevant, the "Not Secure" note in the browser (http:// instead of https://) may scare people off.
- The Sponsor link shouldn't lead to a dead end for anyone who isn't on Github, it gives the impression that you only want to address the initiated.
- "Best viewed in 360p or better" (on the Tutorial page) looks like something from the last millennium.
- In the documentation, "Phix is now (since it is now around 38.5MB) distributed in five parts" looks like something from the last millennium, too.
- On the Download page, the paragraph that starts with "Lastly on Windows (only), pdemo.exw is automatically run ..." looks rather intimidating.
- The three entries in the Blog are from 2010, 2010 and 2021, giving the false impression that nothing has happened since 2021 and little in the 10 years before.
Regarding Phix itself, personally I'm really happy with it as it is (though I may feel a slight longing for a graphic IDE like the one that Judith Evans had been working on ...). I have only one humble request: when compiling a program with p -c myprog.exw, if there is an icon file myprog.ico in the same folder, would it be possible to automatically use it for the exe file?
Well, you said not to be shy ... :)
Robert
Ah yes, sorry, I read that, quietly agreed with most of it, worried about it a while, struggled to figure out anything actionable or even where to start, and let it fall through the cracks.
Regarding the icon, yes you can, though it may need to be in a very specific format. On line 1016 of pglobals.e is the definition constant default_rs_icon = {"ok.ico",{0,1}}.
You could edit that, or perhaps easier/safer you could backup/replace/restore that file. You may need to look inside ok.ico to figure out how to make your myprog.ico compatible with it.
In the docs, Core/Statements/Special/format directive contains some gumpf I wrote/tested a very long time ago that may or may not still work.
