File based predef in analogy to ammonite

[mpacer]

In Ammonite, you can pass in a file to the --predef command line option. It seems that almond only allows you to pass in a string that implements some scala code.

I tried to get the same effect in a variety of ways

• I attempted to cat a file into the option's value via the command line --predef $(cat "${PATH_TO_PREDEF}/spark_predef.scala"), and while that didn't cause it to fail to start… none of the content was actually run.
• cat and join everything onto a single line, adding semi-colons to the end of lines based on key words.
  • This effectively required getting rid of all comments; but still did not work
• passing in a $exec and $file command to load the script
  • This didn't work because the dependencies had not yet been resolved at the time that they needed to be inside the script (see http://ammonite.io/#Multi-stageScripts)
  • or if I added a @ the almond interpreter attempted to reload all of the other predefs again (as well as the predef I supplied) and crashed
  • or if I removed the need for those dependencies to be completely resolved… it also attempted to reload the other predefs again (as well as the predef I supplied) and then crashed

So… I'm thinking there's no good way to do this right now.

Is there a reason almond does not replicate ammonite's --predef file functionality? If the reason is only "we haven't done that yet", how would we go about changing that?

@jameskoch2 @alexarchambault @MSeal

[jameskoch]

I would use this as well. For now, since I had already created my own kernel using the almond ScalaInterpreter, I just read the file in my own code, then pass this into the predef constructor argument.

[mpacer]

@jameskoch could you be more explicit about the steps involved in that?

When you say that you read the file in your own code, where does that code live and what runs it?

What do you end up passing into the predef constructor?

[alexarchambault]

I agree this ought to be fixed. I'll look into it (or if any of you feel like sending a PR…)