[E-Lang] Updated E in a Walnut

[Marc Stiegler]

An updated version of E in a Walnut is now available at

http://www.skyhunter.com/marcs/ewalnut.html

This version of the book is synchronized with the 0.8.10 release of E,
making it the first release of the book that very consistently targeted a
specific instance of E: historically the book has suffered from being a
little bit based on the last released version of E, the next planned version
of E, and the far future 1.0 version of E :-). All the code examples have
actually been run through E 0.8.10, so this is also the first version of the
book in which I can confidently say there are very few syntax errors (though
my checking procedure was sufficiently laborious and error prone that there
are probably still one or two errors; in the future, there will be a version
of updoc that can analyze walnut, at which point we will be able to assert
there there are no errors :-) The Quick Reference Card has not yet been
updated, but that is in the works.

The new version of the book includes a new set of naming conventions applied
ubiquitously, based on Vow and Rcvr as suffixes. The section on emakers has
been fleshed out, and hopefully readers of the book will consequently have
much less trouble working with them than I had while trying to understand
them well enough to write about them :-) A rather comprehensive new example
is included in the Normal Programming section, the single-cpu Racetrack
game. I have tightened up the introduction, though I can now already see
further opportunities for tightening :-) Examples of secure distributed
computing patterns have been laid out at greater length.

Though I have replaced many of the red items in the old draft with actual
text, I have found to my dismay that this version has about as much red as
the old version, maybe more, as I have identified numerous items deserving
explanation that I had not even thought of in the last version. I believe,
however, that I have now crossed the threshold into diminishing numbers of
new items to incorporate, so the next version should have a lot less red
(and a lot more text :-)

And I have incorporated my favorite comment from the chat session brought to
us by Darius (thank you):

"I think the key to hooking someone is to make them read the whole walnut
cause it just looks like another scripting language until you get into the
security and distribution then its like fireworks." Yes, exactly.

My thanks to everyone who sent me comments on the earlier version of the
book; I have incorporated most (not yet all) of those comments, though not
necessarily in exactly the way the commentators might have proposed in the
beginning :-)

--marcs