ripple:

Right. Blog. Keyboard. Fingers. Just start typing. So, I needed to take a screen capture of the Ripple command line for a presentation yesterday, and was a little embarrassed by this old and awkward formatting:

1 >>  :timbl >> foaf:knows >> foaf:name >> .

rdf:_1  ("Dan Brickley"@en)
rdf:_2  ("Libby Miller")
rdf:_3  ("Jim Hendler")
rdf:_4  ("Henry J. Story")

2 >>

Old, because this is how it has been since the dawn of Ripple time. Awkward, because:

1. The >> input prompt clashes with the >> application operator (which in earlier versions of Ripple was a slash, apart from being an infix operator. More to come on the new syntax).
2. The RDF Bag -styled index for query results (rdf:_1 and so on) has always been a little misleading. It’s particularly wrong now that Ripple is much more loosely coupled with the RDF data model.
3. Without the spurious RDF Bag syntax, the parentheses around individual query results (indicating that they are lists) are as unnecessary as they are unsightly. Just as the top-level parentheses of a line of input are omitted — so you can type 2 3 add >> instead of the more obviously list-like (2 3 add >>) — so it can be with output: just pretend the parentheses are there, and remember that query results really are lists.

It took all of five minutes to put a much improved format in place:

1) :timbl >> foaf:knows >> foaf:name >> .

  [1]  "Dan Brickley"@en
  [2]  "Libby Miller"
  [3]  "Jim Hendler"
  [4]  "Henry J. Story"

2)

This does look better, doesn’t it?