May I present to you the evsrv (eval server), a multi-user, multi-tasks, shared time "Arc Machine"!

Once you've created an account, you're in front of our own Arc REPL, with your own environment (i.e: you can define stuff, and state is preserved between requests & logouts-logins).

It's all new, so expect bugs & problems. Plus, I'm not quite sure it can stand on the long term, even more on this small server (single core, 1gb memory, and already running, as you can see, http://dabuttonfactory.com).

Oh yes, and forgive me for the URL, I may buy a domain name for it, but I thought you might like to play with it even in its "alpha" stage ;-)

It runs on a modified version of Arc, that uses some extra MzScheme stuff, mainly namespaces & sandboxes. I may post the source, but like for the domain name, not now. Want to see if it works on the wild before.

Please don't spam it too much for now, I mean don't tell all your friends. But play with it for yourself as much as you want ;-)

Suggestions, ideas, bug reports are greatly appreciated.

Plus, hmmm, did you even bother trying it? You may have chosen another username, but:

   arc> (user->repl* "rntz")
   nil

I am, at least I hope, certainly wrong on my analysis, but sorry, that's how I read your message. And obviously, I don't like to be taken for a moron. And obviously, I don't like this kind of "stealing".

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1: I'm sure some people think this. They might be right, but this kind of reasoning also lead to "GMail/... has no future", which was proved to be wrong.

I don't know if I'll seriously keep on working on the evsrv, but I can think of lots of good features that being web-based would enabled.

It's true I don't (well, didn't) have an account on the eval server. I didn't really feel the need to try it, not because I think it's crap, but because... well, it's a persistent REPL on the web. That's most of what I need to know, really, and if I ever need a persistent web-based REPL I'll know where to go - I trust it to be everything you say it is (and now that I've looked at it, it is; and it's swanky to boot). Just because I don't yet have a use for a thing doesn't mean I think it's crap. Hell, I don't yet have a "real" use for Arc itself beyond just playing with it as a sort of language sandbox - I haven't even tried firing up the webserver that comes with it! Does that mean I think arc or the arc webserver is crap? Hell no.

I have no intention of stealing your code. If you don't want to share your code, then don't; I tend to assume that Arc-related stuff will be open-source simply because it's common. And if you do share your code, I won't use it for some private purpose that "I'll not communicate about"; I'd share it back. That's how open source works.

The reason why I asked to see the source, despite you noting that you didn't intend to release it until testing it in the wild, was because I imagined (as CatDancer seems to have surmised) that the reason you didn't release it was because you weren't satisfied with its quality yet; hence the comment about "even if it has bugs or scalability issues or whatever".

> Does that mean I think [...] the arc webserver is crap? Hell no

Actually, on some points it is (IMHO of course) ;-D

> I won't use it for some private purpose that "I'll not communicate about"; I'd share it back. That's how open source works.

Sadly everyone is not as honest as you :-/ I've met some people not understanding what FOSS is about, and being big bitches about it, so I'm now more suspicious than I used to be.

But this is no excuse, I was not right to emit judgements about you based on my past experiences.

> weren't satisfied with its quality yet

Yep, was/is the case, see last item on the TODO list (in evsrv.arc)

> some cool stuff (for example, AJAX

Actually, nothing cool or magic about Ajax. It's just sugar (here).

> some way of maintaining a persistent REPL)

More magic here :-) Although it is just because of MzScheme being a very good language, and having namespaces and sandboxes.

> I don't ask with a purpose already in mind, but rather to learn

The noblest of all purposes ;-)

All (almost all?) of the code related to Arc so far has been released as open source by various authors, including rntz's extensive work with Anarki.

Thus when code hasn't been released, it's been because the author doesn't think it's good enough yet, instead of because the author wants to keep it proprietary.

I'm pretty sure it was a statement of curiosity. I'd venture to say that that's the intention most of us would have in asking to see the source. (Hell, I'd be interested in seeing it.) You're probably reading too much into this.

  arc> (string #\()
  ; can't send, even if I click the button instead of hitting "enter"

  arc> #\(
  )

  #\(
  Error: UNKNOWN::4: read: unexpected `)'

  arc> "("
  )

  "("
  Error: UNKNOWN::4: read: unexpected `)'

Beside that point, very nice job. I especially like the interface: it looks great. My (light) testing yields no other bugs, at this point.

Also, not a bug, but a suggestion (tested in Firefox 3.0.8):

This is not pedantry, this is bug reporting!

Yes, the check for '(', ')'s is really naive, and to be honest, I don't feel like coding a decent Lisp parser in Javascript for now :-)

> can't send, even if I click the button instead of hitting "enter"

This was actually not a bug, but a desired feature :-D But this was totally stupid, since the '(' check is incorrect in some cases. Now, clicking the button will anyway send the content, no check done in JS. If your content is invalid, evsrv will tell you:

   arc-online> (    ; then click on the button
   Error: UNKNOWN::0: read: expected a `)' to close `('
   

Yes, absolutely. This is now (partially) done. `sig' and the majority of cases will be correctly handled, but not everything. `(for i 0 1000 (pr i))', for instance, is still "broken".

The problem is, the results are inserted in <pre> blocks, and after some search, it's easy to make them break lines on whitespaces, but not otherwise (CSS property "white-space").

Plus, a small bug I just recently noticed has been fixed: evaluating "nil" or "()" or "#f" didn't work. It now does ;-) But:

   arc-online> #f
   nil
   arc> #f
   #f

   arc> (eval '#f)
   nil

Oh, and I tried the site today with Safari, and it globally works but the layout is bad. I'll fix this ASAP.