Arc Forum | Ask ArcLang: What do you write Arc in?

Arc Forum

3 points by imok20 5267 days ago | 5 comments

I'm quite new to Arc, and I'm having a hard time getting started. I've some experience with Scheme (and a lot of experience in other languages), so I'm not completely new to all of this, but two things are making it hard for me to get into this: 1) What environment do you program in? I'd love some syntax highlighting. I'd like to avoid Emacs, but maybe now's the time to learn it? 2) What does Arc have built in? Is it ALL covered in the tutorial? Why isn't there a little website that lists and documents all the built-ins in Arc. And maybe one that can hold approved or highly-voted libraries?

Any help would be GREATLY appreciated.

I'd like to dive into Arc.

5 points by conanite 5266 days ago | link

With apologies to those who have heard this before ... "Welder" has improved quite a bit since I first mentioned it here - http://www.fnargs.com/2009/05/introducing-welder.html

As far as I know it's the only seriously arc-aware editor in the world - with full syntax highlighting, paren matching, jump-to-definition, delete-surrounding-form, surround-form, expand-macro among others. And it's largely written in arc, so you can use all your arc skillz to customise it.

The catch: it depends on rainbow - http://github.com/conanite/rainbow - and hence on java (the core editor UI is a standard java component) so your enjoyment will depend on having a jdk installed.

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3 points by fallintothis 5267 days ago | link

Others have answered 2, but to 1: I'm a Vim user, so I used to write Arc code sans syntax highlighting -- the Anarki highlighter wasn't that good. I soon got sick of this, so over the summer I wrote my own highlighter & ftplugin, which I posted at http://arclanguage.org/item?id=10147. It's the most complete/up-to-date syntax highlighter I'm aware of, inasmuch as it works for me. I haven't had much feedback about it, but if you're a Vim user, I'd appreciate any input you have!

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1 point by thaddeus 5267 days ago | link

> What environment do you program in?

I use Textmate with Terminal. There's an bundle for it here -> http://github.com/aran/arc.tmbundle It's a little out of date, but you can easily hack changes to it if you need to.

> What does Arc have built in? Is it ALL covered in the tutorial?

Arc has nothing built in (for ide/gui/editor management), so it's not covered in the tutorial.

> Why isn't there a little website that lists and documents all the built-ins in Arc?

I think pg (paul graham) has chosen this forum as a means for distribution/collaboration. I suggest you check into -> http://af.searchyc.com/ since, by default, the forum has no built in search mechanism There's also google -> http://lmgtfy.com/?q=arc+forum+between (lol - I had to use lmgtfy at least once in my life :).

Also.... I know conanite has built an arc interface -> http://arclanguage.org/item?id=6002, but I haven't tried it.

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1 point by aw 5267 days ago | link

1) I use Emacs (mostly because I've always used Emacs), but I haven't tried its syntax highlighting mode.

2) Check out Ken Shirriff's extensive documentation on arc2 http://arcfn.com/doc/index.html plus his description of "what's new in arc3": http://arcfn.com/2009/06/whats-new-in-arc3.html

Arc is so young it doesn't have many libraries yet. Some are in Anarki (http://github.com/nex3/arc) and on my site (http://awwx.ws/)

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2 points by garply 5248 days ago | link

Emacs in viper mode, with some customizations on the emacs config from Anarki.

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