[climacs-announce] latest progress

[Robert Strandh]

Dear mailing-list member, 

There is no doubt that the most exciting thing that has happened since
the previous progress report is that Climacs now has a syntax module
for Common Lisp. 

A group of four students: Nada Ayad, Julien Cazaban, Pascal Fong Kye,
and Bruno Mery, have been working for the past two months or so to get
this working.  The first commits were made last week (just in time for
me to announce it at the Amsterdam Lisp meeting), and we have seen a
steady stream of improvements since then.  In theory, the project is
due tomorrow, so there is definitely the possibility that this stream
will stop after that.  So feel free to play around with the features,
submit patches, add new features, etc.

I am discovering the features myself now, so I am sure I do not yet
have the full picture.  Yesterday, I tested some of the syntax
highlighting features, and I am already impressed.  For instance,
trying to use a digit that is not valid for the radix in the CL #nrxxx
construct makes the token change colors.  

There are still some problems, of course, that may or may not be fixed
by tomorrow.  I advice against major modifications on your part before
that. 

Other improvements since the previous progress report:

  * Improvements to Prolog syntax. 
    (thanks to Christophe Rhodes)

  * Improvements to HTML syntax (organize the grammar around concepts
    in the standard, more elements, performance improvements).

  * Performance improvements of the Earley Parser in the form of
    precomputed prediction rules and a faster test for whether a rule
    has been predicted.  Also avoid generic-function dispatch on
    functions that are called frequently. 
    (thanks in part to Christophe Rhodes)

The next speed improvement to the parsing framework might be to allow
for a "manual" test to determine whether a rule is valid for
prediction.  To illustrate this idea for CL syntax: currently,
whenever an expression is expected, all rules that handle the dispatch
macro character #\# will be predicted.  However, most often, the next
lexeme is not #\#, so these predictions will not be used further.
They must, however, be traversed when the completer searches this
state for valid incomplete items.  All this is costly.  A simple test
that makes it possible to test the next lexeme when a rule is about to
be predicted could cut down on this work considerably.  A similar
phenomenon will occur in HTML mode when each inline element will be
predicted for each word in an ordinary paragraph of text. 

Keep up the good work. 
-- 
Robert Strandh

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: any sufficiently complicated C
or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden
slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.
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