[E-Lang] comments on new E(s)

[Marc Stiegler]

I have a couple of comments and corrections on the recent spate of
announcements for the New E:

-- Dean's transformer. While Dean properly lards his messages with warnings
about how preliminary it all is, we did one comparison of performance for
the only piece of code I have written that actually does a noticeable amount
of processing. In that real-world operation, the code ran about 3x as fast
on Dean's transformer. I believe a standard benchmark would show a much
larger improvement than our real-world example showed...and would love it if
someone ran a benchmark to see :-) So if you don't need comm but do need
speed, you might give it a whirl.

-- Markm's 0.8.10. Markm properly lards his message with warnings about only
supporting 2-vat comm, and 3-vat comm is still underway. Amusingly, all the
applications I know about  that have been written in E run just fine with
only 2-vat comm--only one of those applications ever tries to do 3-vat comm,
eDesk, and eDesk has a fallback mechanism in its structure anyway so that if
the 3-vat introduction fails, it degrades gracefully to using 2 2-vat
connections with a transparent forwarder in the middle. So don't let the
absence of 3-vat comm put you off from building secure distributed
applications!

-- This is the first version ever to have any kind of persistence support.
Congratulations, markm! My apologies to everyone for the fact that the
current version of Walnut does not yet explain how to use it :-) If you have
a purpose for this, rest assured we'll help you :-)

-- eBrowser:

>    o  It now does intelligent indentation based on the lexical structure
of
>        the language. (Actually, it currently parses as well as lexes, but
it
>        should only need to lex.) (Note: Elmer now uses this indenter also,
>        but neither properly unindents closing brackets.)

Clarification: unindenting closing braces is improper only in that it is not
done on-the-fly as you are typing. When you press the reformat button the
braces are properly realigned along with everything else. The formatting is
quite beautiful, the most sophisticated automated reformatting I have ever
personally experienced, though I have heard of other reformatters of similar
and greater cleverness. This reformatter is good enough so that the
sticklers over at Agorics (dean's company) could use it, a remarkable
achievement :-)

>    o  Just coming in under the wire, eBrowser now supports drag-n-drop.
Both
>        among eBrowsers, and also between eBrowser and the rest of the
desktop.

Actually, it only works from the desktop to eBrowser: you can drag/drop
files onto eBrowser and it will open windows on the files.

--marcs