[IPython-dev] magics and metadata

[Jonathan Taylor]

> The trick is to find a clean way of expressing this that happens:
>
> 1. before execution of the cell. Highlighting isn't very useful by the
> time the cell has been run
>

Fair enough, but the browser can update the highlighting if it is told
(after execution) that it is a %%bash cell. So, after execution, the
highlighting would look OK (much like after rendering markdown looks like
rendered LaTeX).



> 2. keeping the separation between kernels and notebooks we currently
> have.  Keep in mind that the kernel has *no idea* that it's being
> called by a notebook, all it knows is that it was given a chunk of
> code to run.
>

Each chunk can be thought of as a cell. In the console, a chunk would be
either one line or a multiline input, much as cell magics work in the
console right now.
Some frontends could use the metadata associated
to that chunk, others might not.

I don't know the internals of the console that well, but how different is
it to the logic
in Min's test script for a notebook (https://gist.github.com/2620876)? If
each call
goes through something like line 32 in that file, then it seems like it is
reasonable to have
a msg that is a "metadata" for that last execute request. This script has
no notebook, but I would be happy
if I could send the iochannel some metadata (via the shell channel) for the
last execute request.

What would be needed is for the execute request to generate some "metadata"
requests.

Jonathan




-- 
Jonathan Taylor
Dept. of Statistics
Sequoia Hall, 137
390 Serra Mall
Stanford, CA 94305
Tel:   650.723.9230
Fax:   650.725.8977
Web: http://www-stat.stanford.edu/~jtaylo
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