"Try it now"

[Jacob Carlborg]

On 2011-04-13 22:38, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> I'm quite excited about the new look of std (right now realized only by
> http://d-programming-language.org/phobos-prerelease/std_algorithm.html).
> Here's a suggestion on how we could improve it more.
>
> Adam wrote an in-browser evaluator for D programs. These, when presented
> on the homepage with "hello, world" in them are of limited usefulness.
> However, a personalized "try it now" button present for _each_ artifact
> in an std module would be of great usefulness.
>
> When I try some html or javascript I find it very useful to go to one of
> those sites that allow me to try some code right then and there. The key
> aspect is that the code edit field is already filled with code that is
> close to what I'm looking for, which I can then edit and try until it
> does what I want.
>
> Similarly, it would be great if next to e.g.
> http://d-programming-language.org/phobos-prerelease/std_algorithm.html#setUnion
> there would be a "Try it now" button. Clicking on that button would open
> an overlay with an edit window. The edit window initially contains the
> example text:
>
> unittest
> {
> int[] a = [ 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9 ];
> int[] b = [ 0, 1, 2, 4, 7, 8 ];
> int[] c = [ 10 ];
> assert(setUnion(a, b).length == a.length + b.length);
> assert(equal(setUnion(a, b), [0, 1, 1, 2, 2, 4, 4, 5, 7, 7, 8, 9][]));
> assert(equal(setUnion(a, c, b), [0, 1, 1, 2, 2, 4, 4, 5, 7, 7, 8, 9,
> 10][]));
> }
>
> Then the user can change, compile, and run that program, to ultimately
> close the overlay and return to the documentation.
>
> What do you think? This would require some work in the compiler (make
> unittests documentable, make their text available to ddoc macros) and
> some work in the front end. I hope this catches the fancy of e.g.
> Walter/Don and Adam.
>
>
> Andrei

This is looking better and better each time. One thing I still don't 
like is the cheat sheet, I think it looks cluttered. I think it's just 
too much text in most of the rows. The text in the Set operations looks 
good.

I would also prefer more vertical space in some of the examples. I think 
the first example for the "reduce" function looks good but I find the 
example for the "filter" function harder to read because there's no 
empty newlines.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg