Break in kcode / pause knitting

[kausalyamahadevan]

Adding this as a separate issue in case this feature is supposed to already exist!
we tried " ;kniterate yarns in " and it did not work.

It would also be nice to be able to add a line directly to kcode that's not a comment (without //). That would translate to a break in knitting and message on the kniterate screen and allow for on-machine debugging

Originally posted by @kausalyamahadevan in #14 (comment)

[ixchow]

Proposed extension:
x-raw-kcode ...
prints anything after x-raw-kcode to the output kcode file.

To resolve:

• does this also break the current pass? (Probably: yes, because otherwise the message could end up in a confusing place relative to the other knitout code in the file.)
• what happens if this does something that changes the machine state? (Probably: the kcode file no longer works properly.)
• should this instead be called x-message because it might be useful in other backends? (Probably: not yet.)

[gabrielle-ohlson]

this is the method that kniterate officially uses as a "pause" command (with any line of code with unsupported text pausing the machine and then display that text as a message on the screen).

we could use the pre-existing x-pause extension and adapt it to be x-pause(‘some text’) maybe, and just have the backend interpret that as pause = true; let message = ‘some text’ and then insert: \n${message}\n

regarding interrupting the pass and starting a new one, I think that is probably the best way to go about it since it doesn't make much sense to insert a pause in the middle of the representation of a pass in k-code (the line of underscores and dashes), so the machine would just carry on with whatever is next as a new pass (code-wise) when the user resumes.

[gabrielle-ohlson]

i am partial to keeping this separate from knitout ;comments though (but maybe we could eventually have the backend convert those into kcode //comments too if that feels worthwhile?)

[kausalyamahadevan]

Yes, I think that "x-message pause here" should be separate from knitout ;comments but I think that sending those to kcode could help with debugging as well!

[ixchow]

The knitout specification does include a pause command, though it doesn't have any parameters. We could re-specify this to display a message (if the machine supports it).