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______) Nomenclature: poke, Poke and pickles
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Jose E. Marchesi
October 01, 2019
GNU poke is a pretty new program and it introduces many a new concept.
As people are starting to join the development, I think it is a good
idea to clarify how I call things. The idea is for everyone to use
the same nomenclature when referring to pokeish thingies. Otherwise
its gonna get very confusing very soon!
First of all we have "poke", the program. Since "poke" is a common
English word, when the context is not clear we either use the full
denomination "GNU poke", or quote the word using some other mean.
Then we have "Poke", with upper case "P", which is the name of the
domain-specific programming language implemented by "poke", the
program.
This distinction is important. For example, when people talk about
"poke programmers" they refer to the group of people hacking GNU poke.
When they talk about "Poke programmers" they refer to the people who
use the Poke programming language.
Finally, a "pickle" is a Poke source file containing definitions of
types, variables, functions, etc, that conceptually apply to some
definite domain. For example, 'elf.pk' is a pickle that provides
facilities to poke ELF object files. Pickles are not necessarily
related to file formats: a set of functions to work with bit patterns,
for example, could be implemented in a pickle bitpatterns.pk.
I hope this helps to clarify things.
Happy poking! :)