[climacs-announce] latest progress

[Robert Strandh]

Dear mailing list member,

Here is a summary of the progress that has been made since the last
progress report. 

First, as promised, the new Lisp syntax continues to evolve.  
Lexemes are parsed into Common Lisp symbols and presented as such
whenever possible.  This opens the possibility of having clickable
symbols and/or of having information displayed when the cursor is over
a symbol, though not much has been done to exploit that possibility
yet. 

A framework for indentation of Common Lisp code is in place, and
indentation functions exist for some common constructs such as defun,
defgeneric, defmethod, defclass, with-slots, let, let*, cond, when,
unless, and prog1.  This indentation framework is smarter than that of
Emacs and does not make mistakes when names of CL functions are used
as local variables, etc., though Emacs indent function is of course
more mature than what Climacs can do at the moment.  I encourage
everyone to check out this framework and add an indent function for
his or her favorite CL construct.  The one for `loop' will be quite
challenging, but some others can be quite simple, especially since I
provide macros to create indent functions for simple constructs.

Christophe Rhodes has released his atypical syntax module for editing
lute notation.  The code is available at this location: 

    http://www.doc.gold.ac.uk/~mas01cr/tabcode-20050708.tar.gz

His syntax module is used in the ECOLM project that you can read about
here: 

    http://vega.soi.city.ac.uk/~dlewis/.home/

For the ILC2005 presentation, Brian Mastenbrook wrote another atypical
syntax module called `slidemacs' which lets the buffer contents be
presented as slides. 

Minor fixes have been made by myself, Brian Mastenbrook, Dan Barlow,
Christophe Rhodes

Dirk Gerrits reported a bug in undo/redo that has been fixed. 

Dan Barlow is rumored to be working on cleaning up key bindings, and
Aleksandar Bakic is rumored to be working on giving Climacs regex
support.  
-- 
Robert Strandh

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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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