[climacs-announce] more progress

[Robert Strandh]

Dear mailing list members,

We continue making amazing progress on Climacs, but we are definitely
reaching the point where we are running out of small Emacs-like
functionality that is easy to put in.  I predict that future progress
will be in the form of bigger chunks but perhaps not as frequent as up
until now.  

Aleksandar Bakic committed his alternative buffer implementation this
week.  Since the buffer protocol is pretty well defined, I think
several implementations could (and should) co-exist, and eventually
the choice of implementation could be made dynamically based on the
contents of what is to be edited.  

As you may have seen, Lawrence Mitchell is thinking of using CL-PPCRE
as a regex library for Climacs.  This will definitely give Climacs
functionality a boost. 

Christphe Rhodes is making progress on his tabcode editor based on
Climacs.  This is an application with an incremental parser and two
panes, one for editing tabcode notation as text, and the other one
that displays a more user-friendly view of what is being edited.  

I have spent most of the week implementing a generalization of the
Earley parsing algorithm for Climacs.  This algorithm is naturally
incremental and can handle ambiguous grammars, which is going to be
necessary for error recovery.  I am hoping this will be the basis of
new syntax implementations, perhaps even of the Common Lisp syntax
that my students are going to work on.

This week's progress itemized:

  * alternative buffer implementation based on persistent data
    structures, and tests for this implementation.
    (thanks to Aleksandar Bakic)

  * query-replace
    (thanks to Matthieu Villeneuve)

  * code factoring of command loops
    (thanks to Matthieu Villeneuve)

  * The function downcase-region, upcase-region capitalize-region 
    are now symmetric with respect to the order of the marks
    (thanks to Aleksandar Backic)

  * started adding optional count arguments to various functions and
    numeric arguments to the corresponding Climacs commands. 

  * implemented an Earley syntax and an embryonic parser for HTML. 

  * modified documentation to reflect a more complete syntax
    protocol. 

Take care, 
-- 
Robert Strandh

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