[climacs-devel] Re: Lisp Gardeners to help Climacs

[John Q Splittist]

Robert Strandh wrote:
> There seems to be a lot of interest in Peter Seibel's "Lisp Gardener"
> project, which is a good thing if it works out as planned. 
> 
> It would be interesting for us to take advantage of this momentum to
> get some help with Climacs development.

A few more tasks spring to mind (completely made up details, of course):

1. LR parser

    The lisp-syntax facility in climacs includes a mostly-general
    LR parser. Currently this has a light layer of macros that make
    it easier, but not entirely transparent, to specify a grammar.

    The purpose of this project is to (a) ex-tract the parser
    functionality from the lisp-syntax file then (b) ab-stract that
    functionality to make it easier to specify a grammar.

    This project would be suitable for 1 gardener with some knowledge
    of parsing and (perhaps) experience in using parser generators.
    There are no very advanced lisp techniques to grok, although it
    is expected that a useful knowledge of macros will be developed
    in undertaking the project.

2. Lisp indentation

    The lisp-syntax facility in climacs includes powerful indentation
    functionality (ie. the automatic and syntax-driven indentation of
    lisp forms). Because it operates on pre-parsed syntactic forms
    rather than a textual representation of the code it should (and,
    in some cases already does) outperform emacs, at least in
    correctness.

    The purpose of this project is to (a) understand the existing code,
    (b) document it, (c) add indentation rules for forms that don't
    yet have them (but see (e)), (d) provide a way for users to
    specify rules for their own forms (which may be covered by (b)),
    and (e) write the ultimate LOOP indentation rule!

    This project would be suitable for 1 to 3 gardeners with a fair
    understanding of lisp syntax -- or the ability to read the spec
    and type TAB in emacs. No knowledge of clim is required.

3. Docstrings

    Currently climacs commands have no documentation attached to them
    within the program itself. There is also no way, currently, to
    access documentation.

    The purpose of this project is to provide docstrings (or similar)
    to the commands in climacs, and, as part of that process, to
    develop a standard format for documenting commands (and, perhaps,
    variables), for presenting that information to the user, and for
    capturing, storing and retrieving that information in the system.

    This project would be suitable for 1 gardener with the ability to
    write clear user-oriented documentation. No lisp knowledge would
    be required to start; it is anticipated that considerable lisp
    (and probably clim) knowledge would be acquired by the end.

JQS