Added functions to betterbatch and debugging on the horizon

I was expecting function to be not so hard (just another way of
running a few steps) but it took a little bit of time all the same.

I got it implemented (though no tests for it yet) and it seems OK, I
will know better how it works when I get around to using it (hopefully
in the next week). Weekends for the tool and weekdays for using the
tool in production :)

With this addition I think the language definition is more or less
complete I think. I can imagine tweaking it a bit, fixing bugs etc,
but I don't expect to implement many other language constructs.

One of the next things that I am planning to implement is a simple
debugger (step through statements, print variable value, maybe change
variable values, etc). I was expecting this to be a fairly major
undertaking but again Python and it's community come to the rescue.
Right on cue

a) Catherine Devlin mentioned cmd2 on her blog,
http://catherinedevlin.blogspot.com/2008/01/introducing-cmd2.html
which made me look at cmd in the Python standard library
b) I found the Python documentation a bit dry (or else I had very
little patience) so googled for some examples - and Doug Hellmann's
excellent PyMOTW (http://blog.doughellmann.com/2008/05/pymotw-cmd.html
if you don't know it - bookmark it!) popped up with some good examples
and great documentation.

I found that I was able to throw together a simple debugger (next,
print_var, print_vars, etc)

So this means that a debugger is really easy to write - and is a much smaller task than I was hoping. Maybe next weekend I get the debugger implementation finished.

BetterBatch released

I have released BetterBatch (http://code.google.com/p/betterbatch/)
and I would like more people to know about it.

I created it as something that I could use at work. We have many tasks
that require adhoc automations which may have different people running
them. These automations may not have a very long life so it often
doesn't make sense to write it up as Python/Perl script. This work is
done on Windows machines so not many of us (me included) do not have a
lot of experience with shell scripting. Even if we did - shell
scripting wouldn't necessarily be the ideal candidate.

So it was designed as a batch file replacement with some improvements:
Some requirements I had while making this:

• output from commands can be assigned to variables
• it needs to be just as easy to call external applications as a batch file
• all actions should be logged
• the return value of everything should be checked (and stop the script on error!)
• it should be prettier than a batch file

I have not tested this on any *nix style machine yet - but believe it
should work (meaning that it probably won't work at first - but I am
hoping that minimal changes will make it work)

Give it a try (please :) )
Download: http://code.google.com/p/betterbatch/downloads/list
Log an issue: http://code.google.com/p/betterbatch/issues/entry
Discuss: http://groups.google.com/group/betterbatch-discuss/topics