01:58 <MagusOTB> hey so I have a n00b question that I'm not sure how to ask. I'm trying to reimplement 'cat' (write a program that prints its stdin to stdout) and I'm not sure how go to about using Env.stdin

01:59 <MagusOTB> like, I get how env.stdout.write() happens async, but I'm not sure how to set up env.stdin.IDK to deal with input

02:01 <MagusOTB> (If it's useful I come from python/javascript/C, never done this 'actor' thing before other than a halfa**ed attempt at pony about 6 months ago that ended in life being too busy to continue)

10:34 <SeanTAllen> Hi MagusOTB: the readline example in examples/ should give a small amount of help.

10:34 <SeanTAllen> This is sadly not documented. When you get it all figured out, a PR with documentation with Stdin would be really appreciated

10:34 <SeanTAllen> So...

10:35 <SeanTAllen> If you look in stdin.pony, you will see a Stdin actor and StdinNotify

10:35 <SeanTAllen> you want to implement a class that implements StdinNotify which you use when setting up Stdin (see readline example)

10:36 <SeanTAllen> The apply method is what you are particularly interested in, as input comes in, that method on the Notify that you implemented will be called. You can then do whatever processing you want to with it.

10:38 <SeanTAllen> Again, once you figure it all out, an update to documentation would be appreciated. I prefer answering questions on the mailing list because there is a record of them for people in the future. IRC logs are harder to search if someone else is trying to find out the answer to this question again in the future. Let me know if you get stuck and I'll help as I

10:38 <SeanTAllen> can.

11:13 <aochagavia> hi there

11:13 <aochagavia> what is the status of Pony on Windows?

11:13 <aochagavia> is there a way to use it without having to compile LLVM myself?

11:30 <SeanTAllen> aochagavia: there are packages available. your mileage my vary.

11:31 <SeanTAllen> see this section from the README: https://www.dropbox.com/s/9s17gkaed5w30ab/Screenshot%202016-11-05%2011.31.20.png?dl=0

11:33 <aochagavia> Thanks! I will try that and let you know how it went

11:35 <SeanTAllen> the windows SDK is the most important part. without it, you will be out of luck but you shouldnt have to build llvm.

11:35 <SeanTAllen> we are looking for someone who wants to become a committer and take on being "the windows person" to handle issues of making sure things work across a range of windows releases, improve documentation, tooling etc.

11:53 <aochagavia> I think I will just spin up a VM

15:32 <SeanTAllen> ok

15:33 <SeanTAllen> ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. did you encounter a problem with the release in bintray?

16:14 <aochagavia> I just wanted to say I downloaded the latest nightly for windows and it just worked

16:14 <aochagavia> so thank you!

16:17 <aochagavia> by the way, what should I do if I want to hack on the standard library?

16:17 <aochagavia> I see the ponyc repo has a packages dir

16:18 <aochagavia> can I just edit those files? How do I run the tests when I am done?

16:25 <aochagavia> I think I just found out thanks to the readme

16:29 <aochagavia> I just tried compiling the stdlib tests and I ran into the following link error

16:29 <aochagavia> LINK : fatal error LNK1104: cannot open file 'libcrypto-32.lib'

16:38 <aochagavia> seems to be solved by downloading binaries of OpenSSL

16:41 <aochagavia> pcre2-8.lib seems to be necessary as well

20:48 <MagusOTB> SeanTAllen: What does 'Implement a clas that impments stdinNotify" mean exactly? I tried: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/2bc604d75d224758823bd9f1e00096dc/revisions

20:48 <MagusOTB> but I'm still getting errors

20:51 <MagusOTB> the error I'm getting is EchoHandler iso! is not a subtype of StdinNotify iso: iso! is not a subtype of iso

20:51 <MagusOTB> which seems... odd... what does the '!' mean?

20:57 <MagusOTB> I think I still have some fundamental misunderstanding of how actors/functions/classes/behaviors compose

20:57 <jemc> MagusOTB: `!` means an aliasing of a reference - the tutorial addresses this topic here: https://tutorial.ponylang.org/capabilities/aliasing.html

20:58 <jemc> doublec also has an excellent blog post on this topic as well: https://bluishcoder.co.nz/2016/05/04/bang-hat-and-arrow-in-pony.html

20:58 <jemc> if you still have questions after looking through those, feel free to ask them here for more info

20:58 <MagusOTB> I mean

20:59 <MagusOTB> TBH it's pretty difficult for me to wrap my head around fancier language features when the most complex program I'm capaable of actually writing is somewhere between "hello world" and "cat -"

21:00 <MagusOTB> I can't experiment with anything at this point because _nothing_ I've tried to do other than copy-paste-from-the-tutorial has worked

21:00 <jemc> the short answer is that `iso!` represents aliasing an `iso`

21:00 <jemc> and to avoid aliasing, you want to `consume` the original reference

21:00 <MagusOTB> yeah, but why does that result in my program not working? I'm confused as to how I created an alias in the first place

21:01 <MagusOTB> it looks to me like there's only one copy of a reference to an iso here

21:02 <jemc> you want to pass the object referenced by `handler` to the `env.input.apply` method, but to do so, you have to explicitly drop your reference to it (which you call `handler`)

21:03 <MagusOTB> okay...

21:03 <MagusOTB> so the recover ... end is supoposed to be in the parameters list to apply?

21:03 <jemc> passing `consume handler` will make the `handler` reference unusable in the rest of your function, meaning you can't break isolation even if you try

21:04 <jemc> so `env.input.apply(consume handler)` will work, and `env.input.apply(recover ... end)` will also work since you aren't assigning a local reference at all

21:05 <MagusOTB> aaah okay

21:05 <MagusOTB> so the fact that I assigned it to handler and then in theory could have passed the same 'iso' to multiple behaviors was the problem

21:06 <MagusOTB> which violates the point if iso

21:06 <jemc> yes, exactly

21:07 <MagusOTB> so ... I'm not trying to be nasty or anything, but I think the tutorial could use more "programs that do things" before it dives into language theory

21:07 <MagusOTB> I'd be interested in writing such things

21:08 <MagusOTB> Would y'all be interested in that?

21:09 <jemc> I think having more content like that would be great and always appreciated

21:09 <jemc> sometimes after a discussion we decide to limit what goes in the actual tutorial though

21:09 <MagusOTB> Cause like, at some point it gets to pattern matching and generics before it gets to "read a file"

21:10 <jemc> I don't personally have a lot of strong opinions about the structure of the tutorial, but others do have more of a vision for what the tutorial "should be"

21:10 <MagusOTB> I mean, IDC where it actually ends up

21:10 <jemc> out of curiosity, have you looked at the `examples` subdir in the `ponyc` repo?

21:11 <MagusOTB> but I feel like there's a wealth of information on how the language works, but not so much on using the stdlib to accomplish concrete goals

21:11 <MagusOTB> Yeah, it's mostly just straight code AFAICT

21:11 <jemc> having more example programs with a significant tutorial-style explanation docstring at the top could be rather valuable

21:12 <MagusOTB> and it's not organized in a beginner->advanced tutorialish sort of way, so I don't really know where to start

21:12 <jemc> that is, you can put triple-quote docstrings at the top of a file to document the contents of that file

21:12 <MagusOTB> SeanTAllen pointed me at one of them earlier, which was helpful

21:12 <jemc> we could also use more content in the "pony patterns" book: https://github.com/ponylang/pony-patterns

21:13 <jemc> which is meant to be more in depth than the tutorial on various specific topics

21:13 <MagusOTB> I mean, my primary beef with it as it is is that I can't _do_ anything with what I'm learning, cause the only thing the tutorial tells me how to _do_ is env.out.print()

21:14 <MagusOTB> and even then, it just sort of assumes I'll know how to get the required context to do that to where I need it by explaining the type system

21:14 <MagusOTB> but yeah, I'll read through this and see if I can add anything useful to the examples, I'm not sure how much use I'll be to start out cause I'm totally ignorant at this point

21:14 <MagusOTB> but hey

21:15 <MagusOTB> "those who cannot do, teach"

21:16 <MagusOTB> oh hey, stdin defaults to raw mode

21:16 <MagusOTB> that's cool

23:09 <andreaa> MagusOTB, I feel the pain :) I've found helpful to grep a lot into the package dir, between the stdlib and its tests there're a lot of goodies in there. EG buffered/reader.pony has an example of using Stdin.

23:10 <andreaa> oh and examples/ as well as jemc mentioned