I appreciate the info. I was actually just looking at Mu since I cloned that code for review recently. Since the framework I'll be doing this in is a testing suite, Mu may be the best model for me to follow.

Since I'm focused on UDP, Looking at comments in ac.scm in Arc, I realized MzScheme might hold the answer - there are plenty of UDP functions in those libraries.

My longterm interest is in shifting my mental focus to a more Lisp-oriented way of programming and thinking. I'm not a programmer by trade; I am a software tester and scripter, mostly. I use Python typically, but after working on an OS build I had to learn Guile and Emacs Lisp quickly. I fell in love with Lisp and Scheme due to this experience.

Arc interest came about after reading about it on Paul Graham's website. I'd worked through a portion of Practical Common Lisp by Seibel and decided to try out Arc. It felt right. Since I also happen to work in the Information Security space, I have ideas that for the most part feel like Lisp is the right language, but I will need to become more proficient. Anarki feels like a good place to start to get there from.

"Software Verification of Orion Cockpit Displays", https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/201700...

I work in Healthcare and we use Eggplant to test a large functional area of our Electronic Health Record (EHR). Like many automation tools, much of the success of the testing comes down to the testing team and how they develop the scripts.

Looking back at this project with new eyes, perhaps swapping out Scheme for Arc, I wonder...

Use Anarki or Anarki's stable branch. The latter is like Arc 3.1 but with a couple of bugfixes.

More details: http://arclanguage.github.io

However, when I put the folder in D:\Steve - D\Apps\, I got the following: D:\Steve - D\Apps\anarki>arc.cmd default-load-handler: cannot open module file module path: #<path:D:\Steve> path: D:\Steve system error: The system cannot find the file specified.; errid=2

    (collect x for x in xs if odd.x)

     (def l (start end)
       (let lis `(1)
         (pop lis)
         (while (<= start end)
           (= lis `(,@lis ,start))
           (++ start))
         lis))

1. Is there a reason you start with `(1) and then pop? Why not just initialize lis to nil?

2. Here's a slightly more idiomatic implementation (also more efficient, because it avoids deconstructing and reconstructing lis on every iteration):

    (def l (start end)
      (accum acc
        (for i start (<= i end) ++.i
          acc.i)))

    arc> (help accum)
    arc> (help for)

"[There is] a sharp contrast between Subordination of Detail and Abstraction as the term is commonly used in Computer Science. Iverson’s notion of subordination is the elimination of notational obligations through the use of generalization, systematic extension, and implicit guarantees. The usual notion of abstraction is the means by which 'API' barriers may be introduced to implement conceptual frameworks that suppress underlying implementation considerations in order to allow a black box reasoning at a different, non-native abstraction level."

I'm very partial to this point, but confusingly I've been calling Iverson's notion of subordination of detail "abstraction", and Iverson's notion of abstraction "service" [1] or "division of labor" [2]. Though lately I try to avoid the term "abstraction" entirely. That seems on the right track.

Regardless of terminology, this is a critical distinction.

[1] http://akkartik.name/post/libraries [2] http://akkartik.name/post/libraries2

---

"Common practice encourages decomposing a problem into very small components, and most programming languages emphasize a clear picture of a small piece of code in isolation. APL emphasizes finding ways of expressing solutions around the macro-view of the problem."

Compare http://akkartik.name/post/readable-bad

---

Quoting Knuth: *"I also must confess to a strong bias against the fashion for reusable code. To me, re-editable code is much, much better than an untouchable black box or toolkit."

Compare me: "Watch out for the warm fuzzies triggered by the word 'reuse'. A world of reuse is a world of promiscuity, with pieces of code connecting up wantonly with each other. Division of labor is a relationship not to be gotten into lightly. It requires knowing what guarantees you need, and what guarantees the counterparty provides. And you can't know what guarantees you need from a subsystem you don't understand."

---

OMG, he's talking about "big picture" and "optimizing for the rewrite" I call the latter rewrite-friendliness at http://akkartik.name/about. And "big picture" is in the navbar on the right of my side.

---

Ok, that's enough replugging. The most tantalizing idea for me here is to try to get structure to do some of the heavy lifting that names do in more conventional languages.

I'm not sure what you think I should try.

After looking up the definition of the 'until' macro, the line of code referenced seems to tell me: if quitsrv* is not nil, then continue to serve-socket, which looks to me, at a noobie's glance, as returning the function "accept-request-with-deadline", opening up threads to serve the request?

i.e., quitsrv* now returns t. According to this definition, doesn't that mean that serve-socket should stop?

And incidentally, when I run more defop macro calls, it returns the 'procedure' but (asv) doesn't work; none of the new page on localhost show up (instead it is "Unknown"). I'll look more into it but not really sure how to proceed after glancing at (def asv).

I've copied down the definitions for while and whilet from arc.arc but they don't seem helpful at first glance. Will look further into them if you think it would be useful.

I just ran an experiment, and indeed the server stops after one more request:

    $ ./run-news
    initializing arc..
    ready to serve port 8080
    arc> (= quitsrv* t)
    ; now browse to localhost:8080; page served
    quit server ; printed by *serve*
    ; hit reload on localhost:8080; no response

  domain.com               #uses the domain to automatically set up SSL with Let's Encrypt
  proxy / localhost:8080   #redirect everything to Arc on 8080

Specifically, they have support for automatically fetching code from git and running a command in the repo, either periodically or triggered by a webhook: https://caddyserver.com/docs/http.git

Though lately I consider it more likely that a hundred-year language will have a leveled-up conception of "compatiblity", one that assumes orders of magnitude more forking activity. (See "the Zen of Mu" at the bottom of http://akkartik.github.io/mu; Mu is my attempt at building out the foundations for a hundred-year stack. With, perchance, something like Arc on top.) Perhaps Arc shouldn't be a single language but a family of forks (https://lobste.rs/s/n0d3qo#c_rue8pf). Not a single tree but a clonal colony (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest-living_organis...). That'll only work if we can make it easy for superficially-incompatible forks to exchange features and functionality back and forth. Which is an unsolved problem so far. So we may well be very far from a hundred-year language.

Be the change you want to see in the world... I'm not really sure how to motivate the community, but I am rather attached to it, even if I have been a very infrequent lurker over the past years. We have had a relatively high amount of discussion over the past few days though...

Some newbie friendly documentation to ns.arc would be great, or perhaps some very simple examples. Have you tried using ns.arc?

  ; my-file.arc
  (= n 2)
  (= my-definition (* n n))
  
  
  arc>
    (= my-definition
      (let my-ns (nsobj)
        
        ; Populate the namespace with the current namespace's bindings.
        (each k (ns-keys current-ns)
          ; Racket has a variable called _ that raises an error when
          ; used as an expression, and it looks like an Arc variable, so
          ; we skip it. This is a hack. Maybe it's time to change how
          ; the Arc namespace works. On the other hand, copying
          ; namespaces in this naive way is prone to this kind of
          ; problem, so perhaps it's this technique that should be
          ; changed.
          (unless (is k '||)
            (= my-ns.k current-ns.k)))
        
        ; Load the file.
        (w/current-ns my-ns (load "my-file.arc"))
        
        ; Get the specific things you want out of the namespace.
        my-ns!my-definition))
  4
  arc> n
  _n: undefined;
   cannot reference an identifier before its definition
    in module: "/home/nia/mine/drive/repo/mine/prog/repo/not-mine/anarki/ac.rkt"
    context...:
     /home/nia/mine/drive/repo/mine/prog/repo/not-mine/anarki/ac.rkt:1269:4

An "Arc namespace" is just a convenience wrapper over a Racket namespace that automatically converts between Arc variables `foo` and their corresponding Racket variables `_foo`.

For some overall background...

I wrote ns.arc when I didn't have much idea what Racket namespaces or modules could do, but I was at least sure that changing the compiled Arc code to more seamlessly interact with Racket's `current-namespace` would open up ways to load Arc libraries without them clobbering each other. It wouldn't be perfect because of things like unhygienic macros, but it seemed like a step in the right direction.

I went a little overboard with the idea that Racket namespaces and Racket modules could be manipulated like Arc tables. However, that was the only clear vision I had when I embarked on writing the ns.arc library, so I approximated it as well as I could anyway. In fact, I don't think the utilities for generating first-class modules (like `simple-mod` and `make-modecule`) are all that useful, because as I understand a little better now, Racket modules are as complicated as they are mainly to support separate compilation, so generating them at run time doesn't make much sense.

I approached this with the secondary goal of letting a Racket program (or a determined Arc program) instantiate multiple independent intances of Anarki. The ac.rkt module was the only place we were performing side effects when a Racket module was visited, and Racket's caching of modules makes it hard to repeat those side effects on demand, so I moved most of them into a procedure called `anarki-init`.

By adding one line to the example I gave...

  (= my-definition
    (let my-ns (nsobj)
      
      ; Load the Arc builtins into the namespace so we can evaluate
      ; code.
      (w/current-ns my-ns ($.anarki-init))

      ...))

I used issue #95 on GitHub to track this task, and I talk about it a little more there: https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/issues/95

Before I started on that, I did a bunch of cleanup to get the Anarki unit tests and entrypoints running smoothly on all our CI platforms. To get started on this cleanup, I had a few questions hjek and akkartik were able to discuss with me on issue #94: https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/issues/94

I was confused for a second or two, because the current top post on that site is almost identical to the one you commented on a year ago.