[climacs-announce] latest progress

[Robert Strandh]

Dear mailing list member,

The past week, I have concentrated my effort on the HTML syntax
module, not because HTML is particularly interesting to the Climacs
project, but because it is the syntax module that I currently use to
determine what parsing-related functionality can be generalized,
abstracted out, and used to implement other syntax modules.  We are
particularly interested in seeing how these generalizations can be
used to implement the Common Lisp syntax module.

Aleksandar Bakic continues to work on persistent buffer
implementations.  He has now started working on a line-oriented
persistent buffer implementation that we hope will improve overall
performance of Climacs buffer operations.

Christophe Rhodes has been very helpful by pointing out potential
problems with buffer delegation and with problems in the interaction
between Climacs display functions and McCLIM cut-and-paste
functionality. 

Here is an itemized list of what happened the past week:

  * Made html-syntax display from the sequence of lexemes as opposed
    to from the buffer itself

  * Split off html-syntax into a separate package. 

  * Fixes of typos and minor problems in the documentation, and
    updates to the documentation related to delegating-buffer.
    (thanks to Aleksandar Bakic)

  * Performance improvements to the persistent buffer implementation
    (thanks to Aleksandar Bakic)

  * Introduced functions to traverse a parse stack encoded in the
    sequence of parser states that the Earley parser generates. 

  * Modified the html-syntax to display from the parse states as long
    as a valid parse of the buffer exists, and from the sequence of
    lexemes when no valid parse exists. 

-- 
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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