[Ecls-list] Configuration patch

[Jerry James]

On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 2:14 AM, Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll
<juanjose.garciaripoll at googlemail.com> wrote:
> But do not bother to resend these ones. I will process them ASAP (which, as
> you said, might be not too soon :-)

Oh, I'm in no hurry. :-)

> It depends :-) I got as far as being able to link ECL into Emacs long long
> time ago. This involved quite some heavy hacking of the program, to remove
> its garbage collector and replace it with the Boehm-Weiser one, but it was
> more or less a two nights job (the gc stuff), plus some additional work to
> link ECL in. The advantage of ECL is that you do not need to replace all of
> emacs with the lisp from scratch. You may let ECL manipulate emacs
> structures and then gradually replace components. But first it would be
> interesting to see whether there are good elisp compilers that work with
> ECL.

Hmmm.  Maybe I should look at building an elisp compiler first, then.

The thing that keeps preventing me from seriously pursuing this is
actually character and string encodings.  ECL is UTF-32 inside, isn't
it?  I don't even know where to start with porting a MULE-inside
(X)Emacs to a Unicode-inside CL.  In the XEmacs code base, we have
probabilistic character encoding detectors, and so forth, all of which
would have to be made to work in a Unicode world.  It's so daunting
that every time I think about just experimenting a little with putting
a CL engine inside, I think about this, and change my mind. :-(
-- 
Jerry James
http://www.jamezone.org/