[slime-devel] slime repl commands

[Christian Lynbech]

>>>>> "Marco" == Marco Baringer <mb at bese.it> writes:

Marco> i just applied a patch which adds "repl commands" to slime.
Marco> the syntax is #\, command-name &rest args. I used the comma instead of
Marco> #\: since, afaict, #\, will never appear at the start of a valid lisp
Marco> form (unless you're messing with the read table in which case you can
Marco> just deal with it).

A few comments (but do not misunderstand, I think the idea is good). 

I am not sure that I am all that enthusiastic about the choice of #\,
rather than #\: since there are already at least 3 systems using the
latter.

I am also not quite sure why you need something that cannot start a
lisp form. Couldn't you just check to see if <whatever> was a defined
command and if not just put <whatever> back into the stream?

It may be nice to have a command that manipulates
*default-pathname-defaults* but I think that calling it `cd' will
confuse at least CMUCL users (for instance, `load' does not takes its
notion of CWD from *default-pathname-defaults*).

An important feature of a REPL command facility is a help command that
gives an overview over what commands are currently available and is
able to provide a simple synopsis of their arguments.

It is unfortunate that any mistakes with a command lands you in the
break loop. At least I tend to make lots of mistakes and having to
exit the break loop each seems rather annoying (to me at least).

One of the great advantages of the REPL commands of ACL and the
look-alike packages is that you do not need all that extra
quoting. Ie. it would be nice to extend the repl reading such that one
could do

        ,cd ..

rather than having to write

       ,cd ".."

PS

I know I sort of promised to look into integrating one of the REPL
packages into SLIME. I will make an effort to get back to that, RSN.


------------------------+-----------------------------------------------------
Christian Lynbech       | christian #\@ defun #\. dk
------------------------+-----------------------------------------------------
Hit the philistines three times over the head with the Elisp reference manual.
                                        - petonic at hal.com (Michael A. Petonic)