Richard Barker <[log in to unmask]> wrote (on different
messages, which I will consolidate into one answer):
>I know you could just add the items and sets, etc. If I enter a number of
>new sets in PDL, I don't want to have to enter them all in again in Adager.
I agree.
>I suppose I'm just being lazy,
Good for you. Technological advances have happened because
of attempts to provide FUTURE laziness at the cost of a bit
of extra work today. Naturally, there is a balance to be found
somewhere in terms of the probability of EXTRA future work due
to today's laziness (i.e., "a stitch in time saves nine"). So, I
guess that what we are trying to do is to OPTIMIZE the overall
ratio between work and laziness within a given time range. Some
technologies, of course, have also (unknowingly) "bundled" lots
of extra future work, such as environmental clean-up nightmares.
In terms of technology, the provider MUST work extra hard to
make the user's life as easy as possible. Otherwise, why would
the user bother to pay for the technology? In this particular
case, I am the provider (because I programmed Adager's command
interpreter) and Richard is the user. I have studied, very
carefully, all the comments on this thread. Rene Woc, Robert Mills,
Art Bahrs, Leonard Berkowitz, Carol Darnell, and Steve Dirickson
had very wise suggestions regarding Richard's desires. In the
end, Richard resigned himself to work within the current limitations:
>so I think I'll create a command file using
>Qshow to generate the output, then convert this into a job to create the
>Adager Job. Rene Woc, made a good suggestion that I start with the Database
>changes and then export the Schema.
Then, Richard expressed his preference:
>I prefer the other way around just
>because I can make PDL changes at will (with mistakes of course) and it
>doesn't affect the database,
Good point. This IS a convenient and pleasant thing. I should have
provided the technology that would have allowed Richard to enjoy his
preference. Fortunately, I still can.
>where as I only get one chance with the DB (we
>have no development copy).
Oops! Steve and Art then reminded Richard about "a stitch in time saves
nine" (a variation on the laziness-optimization challenge).
Regardless of the operational aspects of managing a data center (to
minimize the overall amount of effort and grief), I am convinced that
I can do a much better job regarding Adager's interface between the
user's desires and Adager's internal processing engine (which carries
out such desires as quickly and as safely as possible).
So, folks, this is your chance to tell me (using kind words, please)
about your frustrations and desires. I plead total guilt regarding
Adager's lack of a "schema-input" interface. It has been one of
those things that "fall into black holes". I also believe that I can
improve Adager's current command-interpreter infrastructure so that
you can specify more within one line.
Right now, Adager's command interpreter understands an "imperative
sentence" that consists of a verb and an object, in any sequence and
with non-ambiguous abbreviations, such as "add path", which you can
also enter as "a pa" or "pa a" or "path a" or whatever. For a fuller
description, please see http://www.adager.com/AdagerGuide8.html#78202
Then, once Adager knows WHAT you want to do (to add a path, for
instance), it requests additional information. It would be nice to
be able to give all of this additional information in a Unix-like
fashion, all within one command line. Of course, I would still
like to avoid using "-" and I would like to use human words with full
spelling, allowing abbreviations as usual, so that you would get the
best of both worlds :-)
Please let me know your desires and your suggestions. I will be
delighted to study them carefully and to do my best to implement them
in an elegant way. Thanks to HP's announcement of November 14, 2001,
we are all expanding our skills and I have been studying new ways to
program using some of C's text-processing features (so far, I had used
Fortran and SPL/SPLash with a dash of assembler for my text-processing
needs).
So, this is an excellent opportunity for me to learn new programming
techniques (specifically, lexical analysis) as I beef up Adager's
interface. This is much better than doing "academic exercises". There
is a lot of good work still to be done within the MPE-Image ecosystem
(sorry -- I couldn't resist) and I am committed to doing it as I
concurrently expand my computer-programming horizons.
Thank you,
_______________
| |
| |
| r | Alfredo [log in to unmask]
| e | http://www.adager.com
| g | F. Alfredo Rego
| a | Manager, R & D Labs
| d | Adager Corporation
| A | Sun Valley, Idaho 83353-3000 U.S.A.
| |
|_______________|
* To join/leave the list, search archives, change list settings, *
* etc., please visit http://raven.utc.edu/archives/hp3000-l.html *
|
