[slime-devel] Re: [Ilisp-devel] SLIME

[Bill Clementson]

--- Daniel Barlow <dan at telent.net> wrote:
> Bill Clementson <bill_clementson at yahoo.com> writes:
> 
> > I found this comment curious as I thought that you
> > used only a TCP socket to communicate between
> emacs
> > and cl. I had a look at the source and you do
> require
> > inferior lisp mode (ILM) and comint mode. What is
> the
> > rationale for using both inferior lisp mode and a
> TCP
> > socket? Is your intention to entirely replace ILM
> with
> > socket communication or will you continue to use
> ILM
> > for some things and sockets for others?
> 
> "Require" may be a bit of a strong word: it is
> possible to run SLIME
> with only the TCP connection (e.g. to a lisp on
> another machine) but
> you need to (swank:create-swank-server) on the CL by
> hand before
> running slime-connect.  
> 
> That said, yes, if you run the default M-x slime it
> does use
> inferior-lisp to start up a lisp implementation.  I
> think the plan
> is to make inferior-lisp largely unnecessary, but in
> the meantime for
> purposes of hacking slime itself it's damned handy
> to have an
> alternate route into Lisp when things get wedged.
> 
> (There's also the problem that although we can
> redirect all 'normal'
> lisp output, we don't currently trap anything in the
> lisp that
> bypasses the streams layer (e.g. foreign code
> printing to file
> descriptors) so that winds up in *inferior-lisp* as
> well.  I'm sure we
> can solve this some other way, but thus far we
> haven't)

Thanks for the clarification. Incidentally, what was
the rationale for using inferior lisp mode instead of
ilisp to "boot-strap" development? ILISP has some of
the same "negatives" as ILM (since both were built on
comint mode) however it has a lot more functionality
than ILM. It seems like (at least to me) it would have
made more sense creating SLIME extensions on top of
ILISP rather than ILM since there is so much more
functionality in ILISP than there is in ILM. Even if
the eventual goal is to replace all the functionality
that is provided by ILM/ILISP, ILISP would provide
more "short-term" benefits for the SLIME CL developer
than ILM would.

- Bill


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