[mac-lisp-ide] Clotho status update

[Mikel Evins]

Bosco 0.6.1 has been out for a few weeks, and bug reports are not pouring in. A tutorial
on using it is now available at http://evins.net/bosco-howto/. 

Since completing the tutorial, I've been working on a new version of Clotho, the 
OpenMCL-based Lisp IDE for Mac OS X. Progress is incremental, but steady. The
new application is Carbon-based, so that it won't be tied to such specific versions
of Mac OS X. There is a known problem in current versions of OpenMCL such that
binaries built on one version of OSX cannot run on an even slightly-different
version of OSX. Carbon-based applications don't suffer this problem, so, at least
for now, Clotho will be Carbon-based.

As it mentions in the Bosco tutorial, you have to do more low-level work to get things
happening in a Carbon application, so it's taking a while, but the new Clotho application
is building and running, and it knows how to open TEXT documents, edit them, and save them
(though it doesn't yet know how to open its own saved files! doh!). It feels very fast
compared to earlier, Cocoa-based versions. The SLIME interface works, and it's possible
to interact sensibly with the Lisp through that, but the running code won't really be 
very interesting until I get the Clotho listener hooked up again and finish the editor.
I plan to wired up Alpaca-style key-bindings and APIs again.

As a side-effect of building the application, an embryonic CLOS wrapper around the Carbon
APIs is beginning slowly to emerge. I imagine the most generally-useful parts will
migrate back into the next version of Bosco, pushing Bosco a little farther down the
path from template to framework. That would be good. The least pleasing aspect of
building Carbon apps in Lisp is the large number of times one must fail before getting
the magic incantation of Carbon calls just right.

Paul Lathrop reports further improvements to his project-building utilities; those
will certainly go into the next version of Clotho, and I'm hoping I'll have time to
make a dynamic UI-swapper, so that the next Clotho can load and display the contents
of nibfiles, and maybe even let you hook up event handlers to them. We'll see. The
long-term goal is to make it possible to load and test nib resources in Clotho and
save them along with event-handling code into your project. I also plan to make
a facility that runs the application build for you without needing to leave Clotho 
(beacuse of the way that save-application works, that will probably mean running
a child process that does the build).

Contributors are of course always welcome. If you want to get and build the new code,
just check out the head of the cvs repository and build it, Bosco-like, from the
root directory. You'll need OpenMCL 0.14.2.

--me