[E-Lang] more on echat.e

[zooko@zooko.com]

 MarcS wrote:
>
> Having worked my way through the conversion of over a thousand lines of E
> code from 089 to 089t, the biggest blinkin' pain for upgrade is the required
> () on parameterless method calls.

Actually I don't think I needed to do that -- the original version of echat.e
must not have used paren-free invocations?  My notes don't show that I needed
to fix any of those and I have no memory of it either.

The biggest pain in terms of going through and converting syntax was getting
rid of the magic beans `.' notation and replacing it with getFoo() and
setFoo().  That was a major hassle.


> Once you get it compiling syntax free, the only remaining pain is def -> var
> for a small percentage of defs.
> 
> The following Elmer script spots, with a high degree of reliability, the
> variables that need to be var'd, by searching for assignment statements in
> which there is no keyword "def" on the lefthand side, which indicates that
> somewhere above this statement, a "var" object was def'd. This script
> eliminates most of the pain.

Actually I just globally searched and replaced s/define/def/g, s/def/var/g.
No problem.

:-)

Regards,

--Z