Hint Conf

The .hint.conf file

As part of the installation procedure of Helium, a configuration file is created and copied to your home directory. Indeed, every version of Helium that you have installed may have its own version of the configuration file, like .hint-1.7.conf and the one to which the .hint.conf links is the one that contains the settings the interpreters will use.

The following is a typical content for .hint.conf:

#Hint
#Fri Jun 27 15:17:21 CEST 2008
editorcommandlinetemplate=...
additionalheliumparameters=-v --debug-logger
port=5010
overloadingon=true
loggingon=false
browsercommandlinetemplate=...
basepath=/usr/local/helium-1.7
fontsize=14
temppath=/tmp
host=helium.zoo.cs.uu.nl
lvmpaths=.

We shall now consider all settings except fontsize, editorcommandlinetemplate and browsercommandlinetemplate. These are specific to Hint and will be discussed only there.

Comment lines start with #, that 's easy enough. All other lines consist of a name (or flag) followed by = (you may use spaces here or omit them), and finally the value you want to set the name to.

The basepath is the most important setting. It specifies where the active version of Helium can be found. This path is used to find the .lvm files for the Prelude and other provided libraries. If you have any additional paths where .lvm files may be found you can add them to lvmpaths. If you have more than one, separate them by a :. Note that there are defaults for all possible settings, but they may not be the same for the different interpreters, so it is wise to set them all explicity by means of the configuration file.

On we go. Sometimes the interpreters need a directory to store some intermediate files. This directory is specified by temppath. The value given above is typically good enough, but you can change it if you must. You can also specify the standard logging behaviour of the interpreters. Use false to disable logging, and true to enable it. Something similar holds for overloading. By changing the setting for host and port you can change where you expect a logging server to be listening for compiles. It is typically set to the standard location for the server hosted by the Helium team. When experimenting with a new host and port, it is usually a good idea to use the --debug-logger setting to see whether logging proceeds correctly.

Any other helium compiler parameter can be set by specifying them like so

additionalheliumparameters=-v -b 

As you can see, flags are separated by spaces. So what if you want to use a space in one of the parameters? The solution is to escape it, by preceding with a backslash: \ . This implies that backslashes also need to be escaped and you should write \\ to obtain a single backslash.

The additional helium parameter settings override any other setting made by the flags discussed above. So if you enable overloading, but add --no-overloading= to additionalheliumparameters, then overloading will be turned off.