[climacs-devel] Climacs development

[Robert Strandh]

Paolo Amoroso writes:
 > Robert Strandh <strandh at labri.fr> writes:
 > 
 > > I am a little ambivalent about Climacs turning in to a fully-featured
 > > Common Lisp Emacs, because that would mean that, instead of merging
 > > Goatee and Portable Hemlock, we write a third one.  On the other hand,
 > 
 > I think that having a decent Common Lisp text editor--be it Climacs,
 > Portable Hemlock, a merge, or something different--would be useful.

I absolutely agree.

 > There are *now* enough end-user Common Lisp applications, that having
 > some of them available in the same Lisp image would bring part of the
 > integration power of Lisp Machine environments to our *current*
 > systems--with the added benefit of using Common Lisp as a scripting
 > language for free.

Yes. That's definitely what we want. 

 > For example, the Mel email program could call Climacs/Portable
 > Hemlock/whatever to edit messages, in a way similar to Unix
 > applications calling the user's preferred editor via $EDITOR.

Exactly.  I have come to the conclusion that the main missing piece in
this puzzle is the editor.  Without the editor, nothing else will
work.  And we do have most of the rest: debugger pane,
web/documentation browser, mail program, etc. 

 > This could be done by providing protocols for accessing basic editing
 > functionality such as loading a file in a buffer, placing the cursor
 > at a specified location, getting back the edited text as a string,
 > etc.
 > 
 > Such a protocol would not need to be huge and expose all the
 > functionality, just a minimal set of widely available features that
 > may make it possible to use different editors in a more or less
 > uniform way.

Now, that's a good idea.  We need to work on establishing such a
protocol. 

 > This thin abstraction layer needs not be tied to Climacs or Portable
 > Hemlock, it could well be a different project.

Yes, definitely. 

 > All the standard disclaimers apply: this is just brainstorming, I'm
 > not working on this, it's not even vaporware, etc.

Sure, I understand.
-- 
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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