[pro] How to interact with a running lisp instance?

[Martin Cracauer]

I ended up with a strong preference for using screen(1) and the
standard REPL.  In fact I have often thought about putting my
employer's toy into a screen session even for the unattended server
mode.  The Lisp is difficult to shut up anyway and sometimes you have
to play special tricks if there is no terminal on stdin for the REPL.
With a screen session you can do much better post-mortem debugging,
too.  Stream synchronization from error messages also works as if
there was a terminal (because there is a terminal).  This can be handy
when people do output not keeping in mind it might go into a buffered
logfile or so.

SLIME is really too fragile for this.

Any kind of TCP listener/evaluator opens a huge can of worms about
authorization.  With screen(1) you will have to have a ssh login, so
your ssh setup will take care of auth, with the same ssh agent.

The only pain is sending forms from programs but I think *that* is
when you do a custom named pipe (or TCP) solution and you do not use
the same thing for interacting with the Lisp and for non-interactive
evaluations.

Martin
-- 
Martin Cracauer, Programmer, ITA Software Inc, 617-714-2130