Re: [Caml-list] Calling the toplevel from the toplevel

["Jérémie Dimino" <jeremie@dimino.org>]

On Sat, Feb 26, 2011 at 10:44:04PM +0100, rixed@happyleptic.org wrote:
> Up to now all seams to work except for minor annoyances :
> 
> - I cannot start the application directly by linking the custom toplevel
>   with something like "let _ = start_application ()" but I have to call
>   "start_application();;" from the toplevel manually (or from the
>   .ocamlinit file), otherwise the application bindings are not
>   available.

Actually you can, you just have to make sure that .cmi files are
available in the search paths of the toplevel when you run your
application.

> - I cannot let the user uses the toplevel directives "use" and "load"
>   because both writes into stdout whatever the formatter passed to
>   Toploop.execute_phrase (for "use" this is easily solvable by shadowing
>   the toplevel implementation by another one that call Toploop.use_file
>   with my own formatter, but for "load" I would have to copy a lot of
>   code from topdirs.ml

Why not use Topdirs.dir_load with a custom formatter ?

If you are interested, i started some time ago an emacs-like editor
which can run in both curses and gtk mode and which integrates a
toplevel. I add to face the same problems. I solved them by using
Toploop.execute_phrase directly and redefining all directives.

The code is available here:

  http://solaria.dimino.org/cgi-bin/darcsweb.cgi?r=peps;a=summary

The file that may interest you is src/core/peps_top.ml

Also another problem i had is that Toploop.execute_phrase does not
prints errors on the given formatter but raises an exception instead,
and the printer used in Toploop.loop (Errors.report_error) is in the
module Errors for which the cmi is not available. I used a hack which
consists on parsing the output of Toploop.use_silently (file
peps_top.ml, function eval_command).

-- 
Jérémie