unified concept of function calls.
Previously LoB calls were not able to produce results in the
buffer. These changes go some way to allowing them to do that. [There
are still some bugs to deal with]. That meant changing org-babel.el so
that there is a notion of the `source block name' for a LoB line, in
order to construct a #+resname (currently I've made the name the same
as the function call).
I'm also slowly moving towards unifying the notion of `function calls'
a bit more: I've changed the org-babel-lob-one-liner-regexp so that
instead of a monolithic match it now matches first the function name,
and second the function arguments in
parentheses. org-babel-lob-get-info makes that match, and although it
still concatenates them and returns the string, the two elements can
be accessed immediately afterwards using match-string. So that
situation is very similar to org-babel-get-src-block-name, whose
job (in this branch) is also to parse the function *name* and the
function *arguments*. In a few places in the code (esp. function
names), I think the word `info' should be replaced with `call' or
`function call', which I believe more accurately indicates what the
`info' is: a function definition, together with bound
arguments/references.
The function call syntax, i.e. function-name(arg1=ref1), originally
introduced for references (and thereby in LoB), and which I'm
proposing we use throughout, raises the question of default arguments,
and those being over-ridden by supplied arguments, as in e.g. python,
and R.
I'm now proposing to implement it, at least temporarily, as a
degenerate source block (has no body), with interpreter name
'babel'. These 'babel' blocks will use a :srcname header arg to refer
to the source code block that they will use for their body. This
source code block might be in the 'library of babel'. If so it will
use a conventional variable name for its 'main data argument' such as
__data__. Then the babel block (not to be confused with a code block
in the lob) would use :var __data__=ref, where ref is a resource
reference resolved as usual.
This is intended to provide off-the-shelf data plotting and analysis
functions. Current idea is to introduce a new line, perhaps something
like #+babel or #+babel_lib, which will reference (a) some data
and (b) a source block to apply to the data. Code being stolen from
org-babel.el (conceivably some abstraction of some of those functions
could be done to avoid code duplication).
Dan Davison
Eric Schulte