Setting up Medley for TableBrowser development
Although Medley's documentation and published material is scattered across several archives and sources, and doesn't cover all the system facilities, once I find the right document I get most of the information I need on a specific feature.
But sometimes the information is not up to date because Medley is still under development after so many decades.
I bumped into such a case when experimenting with TableBrowser, Medley's tabular data browser tool on which the system file browser is built. Other applications can access and control from Lisp TableBrowser, which is a reusable component with an API.
Before program development with the API, TableBrowser requires setting up a specific environment by loading a source file with some declarations, which are not needed when running compiled applications. The Lisp Library Packages manual explains how to set up the environment in section “Installation” of the “TABLEBROWSER” chapter on page 283 of the PDF. Here the manual provides the File Manager commands to add to the source file of an application that uses TableBrowser:
(FILES (SYSLOAD) TABLEBROWSER)
(DECLARE: EVAL@COMPILE DONTCOPY
(FILES (SOURCE) TABLEBROWSERDECLS)
But in spite of following these instructions I got an error when calling TableBrowser functions.
It turns out that, as a result of the recent modernization work the Medley Interlisp Project is doing, some source files were rearranged and moved. So now all it takes to set up the Lisp environment for development with TableBrowser is the form (LOADCOMP 'TABLEBROWSER), for example in the coms of the program under development.
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