[climacs-devel] Issues with syntax-dependent command tables.

[Troels Henriksen]

Troels Henriksen <athas at sigkill.dk> writes:

> As an experiment, I have removed `global-climacs-table's dependency
> on `lisp-table' and instead made `lisp-table' depend on
> `global-climacs-table' (in order to get the basic navigation and
> editing commands). It seems to work properly, so I believe it should
> be trivial to perform a general cleanup of Climacs' command tables
> and their interdependencies.

Apparently the command table issue was just a symptom of a bigger
problem. It seems that the Climacs internals are fraught with
confusing interdependencies, among other things, that the GUI-layer
depends on the Lisp syntax module. Generally, gui.lisp seems to have
become a bucket for all kinds of bits and pieces, containing a lot of
very important functions, but not really exporting any of them. This
makes it harder to properly divide responsibility among packages, so
I've started to reorganize interdependencies and modules with the goal
of making Climacs' internal structure a bit more logical. My immediate
goal is to isolate the Lisp syntax in the `climacs-lisp-syntax'
package and the files lisp-syntax.lisp and
lisp-syntax-commands.lisp. Fortunately, the existing syntax module
protocol lends itself well to modularity, so this should not be very
hard. Unfortunately, this incompatible change will require
modification of Swine for it to continue to function properly.

Thoughts?

-- 
\  Troels "Athas" Henriksen
/\ sigkill.dk/blog (Danish)