Just starting out

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Jesse Phillips" <jessekphillips+D at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:j77s69$1j3d$1 at digitalmars.com...
> Nick Sabalausky Wrote:
>
>> "Jesse Phillips" <jessekphillips+d at gmail.com> wrote in message
>> news:j75t0k$2q6m$3 at digitalmars.com...
>> >
>> > I created a cmdln library to help with user interaction, which some 
>> > seem
>> > to like.
>> >
>> > https://github.com/he-the-great/JPDLibs/tree/cmdln
>> >
>>
>> Looks very nice. I have a similar (but probably more basic) thing, too 
>> (just
>> one function: "prompt"):
>>
>> http://www.dsource.org/projects/semitwist/browser/trunk/src/semitwist/cmd/plain.d#L216
>>
>>
>> // -- Basic string prompt ------
>> string input1 = prompt("Type some stuff: ");
>>
>> // -- String prompt with validation ------
>> // (failureMsg is optional)
>> string promptMsg = "Do you want 'coffee' or 'tea'? ";
>> string failureMsg = "Please enter 'coffee' or 'tea', not '%s'";
>> bool accept(string input)
>> {
>>     return ["coffee", "tea"].contains(tolower(input));
>> }
>>
>> // This will *not* return until the user enters a valid choice,
>> // so we don't need to do any more validation.
>> string input2 = prompt(promptMsg, &accept, failureMsg);
>
> Interesting the similarities. I do provide more specialized functions for 
> some of those:
>
> auto input2 = menu(promptMsg, ["coffee", "tea"]);
>
> auto input = require!(string, accept)(promptMsg);
>
> I haven't provide the option of displaying an error message, but it could 
> go in the delegate you use in require. And I suppose prompt is a better 
> name than userInput.
>

Yea. I think mine is more customizable and generalized, but yours is more 
batteries-included and ready-to-go (which makes yours very enticing). Maybe 
we could merge our designs and come up with something suitable for Phobos? I 
think this is the exactly the sort of thing that's a perfect fit for 
inclusion in a std lib: Very handy, but for many people not big enough to 
justify adding an external dependency.

> On thing I've been kind of interested in is getting something set up that 
> would allow providing the needed information via a config, args, or at 
> runtime. but haven't done anything with that idea.
>

That would be neat.

One thing I'd been thinking of adding to mine was an alternate function that 
just waited for a single keystroke (rather than a line of text + Enter). I 
think I once had it working on Tango, IIRC, but then I switched to D2/Phobos 
and couldn't figure out how to use Phobos to wait for a single keystroke w/o 
then waiting for Enter.