[slime-devel] Re: Clicky things in the REPL.

[lawrence mitchell]

Luke Gorrie wrote:

> lawrence mitchell <wence at gmx.li> writes:

>> Having used the clim listener, I wondered if it would be
>> possible to make things in the SLIME repl clicky in the same way
>> that they are there.

> This is a very cool idea :-) I think a nice CLIM'alike could be built
> on Emacs/SLIME.

> Do you know how CLIM associates types with outputs -- some kind of
> print-method specialization on magic streams or something? My feeling
> is that using regexps to match unreadable objects isn't a winning
> strategy.

I don't think so either :P.  However, it was the quickest way I
could see of associating unreadable objects with descriptions,
short of majorly hacking what slime sends back to Emacs.

I suppose one way of doing it would be for the Lisp to send a
lot /more/ information back about its output, i.e., each time it
prints an unreadable object, it could add some extra output,
e.g. for classes, we could pass through CLASS-NAME.

I'm rather scrabbling in the dark here, since Emacs doesn't have
as much introspection capability in the SLIME repl as CLIM
does.

When I get time, probably not for two weeks or so, I shall try
to look at the way CLIM does it, and see if it's possible to
steal the idea and adapt it.

Meanwhile, I'll quote from Jamie Zawinski's gdb-highlight.el:

;; This code should be considered an example of how over-use of regular
;; expressions leads to code that is an unreadable, unmaintainable mess,
;; and why it's unfortunate that so much of emacs's speed depends on
;; their use, rather than on the use of more traditional parsers.

And try not to follow suite :P

-- 
lawrence mitchell <wence at gmx.li>