Pycon and Crunchy

This year's Pycon program looks very interesting. I wish I could be there but, alas, the timing was just wrong for me this year. This is doubly disappointing as I would have been able to meet with Johannes Woolard in the flesh. Yes, forget Guido van Rossum, Alex Martelli and other famous names: the one person I wanted to meet is Johannes. For more than a year an a half, I have had the pleasure of collaborating with Johannes on Crunchy, without ever meeting him. This year, Johannes will be the one showing Crunchy off. I'm sure he'll do a great job.

And, if anyone is looking to hire a bright, young, hard-working programmer, Johannes will graduate from Oxford this year.

99 problems: looking for volunteers

Some time ago, Dr. Werner Hett created a list of 99 Prolog problems that could be used to skills in logic programming. More recently, a Ruby learner posted a Ruby version of the first 10 problems, and his solutions. This seemed to be a good idea, especially if one makes use of doctests ... and Crunchy :-). So, I've started my own version of these which you can get as a zip file (containing 6 problems and their solutions) from the Crunchy main page. If you have never done so before, to load a local html file within Crunchy, you simply click on the "Browsing" menu on the left hand side and scroll down until you reach the "Closer to home" section and follow the instructions.

Note that with the next version of Crunchy (the current one is 0.9.8.6) you will be able to start Crunchy with an arbitrary file using something like

python crunchy.py --url=full_local_path_or_url

It would be nice if there could be a complete Python version of the 99 Prolog problems. If anyone is interested in helping, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Automated documentation code testing - part 2

Thanks to Crunchy's simple plugin architecture, after only a few hours of coding the automated documentation testing (for html files) described here has been implemented (the "first approach" described, that is.) It will be part of the next Crunchy release. In theory, code samples for a complete book could be all tested at the click of a button, provided that the book is available as an html document. The next step will be to define a few new directives so that reStructuredText documents can be used as well.

Now, while I have a few sample test files, it would be nice is to find someone who has a real life document with embedded Python code samples as a test user...