[climacs-devel] Re: paredit.lisp, regularization of motion commands, and more

[John Q Splittist]

Taylor R. Campbell <campbell <at> mumble.net> writes:
 
> I started working yesterday on a paredit.lisp for Climacs.

Hooray!

> Right now, there's a bit of a hodgepodge of motion commands

I think consistency is a great idea, and including the syntax in the signature 
is a win.

I wonder whether it would be more useful for the functions (and quite possibly 
the commands) to return MARK on success, rather than T.

> In order to implement these, I also wanted to use several functions
> whose symbols are only internal to CLIMACS-BASE and CLIMACS-GUI.  Is
> there any reason that these are not exported?

In the case of CLIMACS-GUI, only because it's never really had any clients 
before. (That's why I split Swine into swine.lisp in the LISP-SYNTAX package 
and swine-commands.lisp in the CLIMACS-GUI package; it was a quick hack.)

> Would it not make more sense to have
> several generic functions that take objects from buffers and syntax
> instances to classify the objects?  I'm thinking:
> 
>   WORD-CONSTITUENT-P
>   ...

I'd hate for this kind of thing to turn into the monster that is emacs syntax-
tables just to save a bit of typing from having to reimplement the word motion 
commands in syntaxes with a different idea of what amounts to a constituent or 
a bracket. The word motion commands in basic syntax should obviously use 
an 'English' notion of what amounts to a constituent. I would then prefer that 
lisp-syntax implement a method that uses the lisp notion of constituent etc. I 
would favour this strategy over one that tried to create a super-generalised 
word motion function that depended on the method equivalent of regular 
expressions to come up with the actual movement for a syntax. (But that's just 
me.)

Cheers,
JQS (v. much looking forward to paredit for climacs)