On 15/09/2015 20:35, Pierpaolo Bernardi wrote:
- I have no use of "windows" applications for a language system such
as polyml. I expect to run sml interpreters in an emacs buffer using inferior-SML, just like I do on Unix. That's the reason why up to now I only used PolyML rarely, mostly for comparisons against sml/nj (whose prebuilt binary is a console application that I can run from emacs, and hence is a million times more pleasing to use for me, despite being slower than PolyML on most of the programs I care about).
How does emacs run the ML? If it runs it as a process with standard input and standard output through pipes then I would expect Poly/ML to run perfectly well and not produce its GUI. I use Poly/ML that way with my own Windows IDE and the testing version of Isabelle works that way as well.
- for people who don't use emacs there would be little difference
between a console and a window application, I think. In both cases they would get a basic window with the interpreter prompt and not much more.
I personally find Windows console applications painful to use, primarily because it is so difficult to copy and paste. Cygwin and Msys with rxvt at least support copy and paste with the middle button.
David