[E-Lang] more on echat.e

[Marc Stiegler]

> > 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 original echat did not indeed use paren-free invocations (it was my
first E program, I found the paren rules confusing enough so I just put
parens everywhere :-) But I'd thought that markm went through and "fixed"
that for the versions of echat included in E releases :-)

> > Once you get it compiling syntax free, the only remaining pain is def ->
var
> > for a small percentage of defs.

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

Uh, so this means that everything, even function declarations, is var?  It
will work, of course, but will have to be cleaned up to be used as an
exemplar that ships with E itself.

--marcs