Added += operator, and more

No files or tests are named. Start by locating the C kernel's operator handling and the compatibility checks against existing Frontier apps. Done means += works as described without breaking existing apps, validated against the mentioned frontier apps; the update-distribution and Node-package work appears to be separate context.

The question of backward compatibility has come up. Claude is insistent that it should be forward and backward compatible in every way.

I don't agree. It's the forward direction that's essential. Breakage is not okay. But when you upgrade the apps you create might now work on old versions of the system. It's our chance to add new stuff.

So yesterday I asked Claude to make this work:

sum += random (0, 99)

instead of

sum = sum + random (0, 99)

This was practically a bug it was such a huge oversight. I think this every time I type in the stupid version.

But I wanted to see how it feels.

Breakage is #1 as always

But we are bending over backwards to not break existing apps. And that's how we're testing, I'm having it go through some of the frontier apps i wrote and seeing if they work. Almost none of them do. But the bugs are getting fixed and more stuff is working.

The hardest part is wondering if Claude really understands the feature, it always says it does, but then what comes back isn't what's in the C kernel. It's sloppy that way. I end up being the guy who asks "do what's in the C kernel."

Jake I re-read your post from a few months ago about how the globals were the hard part. I've been thinking about that ever since. I remember trying to work with that. Was it the right decision to go multi-threaded until we got that stuff straightened out? Today I would have gotten that right before moving on.

We're getting this release together being true to the last release, which includes stuff from the OPML Editor, and then once that works, we'll have a basis for other directions. We were lucky to have Ted Howard do a snapshot at the time he did, gave us a solid reference point.

I did a whole day's work today on the update distribution system. I now have it working correctly with rssCloud, fully tested. it was written in 2007. there was some structure built in xml.rss.defaultCloud -- but it seems primitive to what i have in the daverss package. We're definitely going to have it be able to run Node packages.

Once the updating code is fully burned in, anyone could be doing what I'm doing with other apps, esp Manila, so we can get the docs running in a fresh environment. Not wanting to do a lot of work here, but part of the project is creating usable versions of whatever we have in the way of docs, apps, examples, etc.