[slime-devel] slime-regex-apropos?

[Edi Weitz]

Attached is a rather hacky patch for slime-apropos. If string is
recognized as an Emacs regular expression then the result of calling
SWANK:APROPOS-LIST-FOR-EMACS with "" instead of string is subsequently
filtered by Emacs' string-match. Otherwise slime-apropos works as
usual.

This is more a proof of concept than a patch intended to be applied by
the SLIME maintainers. I'd like slime-apropos to be regex-aware but
I'm not sure what would be the best way.

Some thoughts:

1. It'd probably be best if this regex behaviour of slime-apropos were
   optional. As the prefix arg is already used there are a couple of
   options:

   - Make the regex behaviour another optional y-or-n-p argument like
     only-external-p.

   - Let the user customize this behaviour via a variable like, er,
     slime-apropos-uses-regex-syntax-p.

   - Define another function slime-regex-apropos and let the user bind
     it to C-c C-a if he so wishes.

2. My childish hack will be inaccetably slow on many machines and
   Lisps because in the regex case the Lisp always has to return all
   symbols and Emacs subsequently has to match them all. It'd be
   Lispier and much faster to do the regex matching on the Lisp
   side. CL-PPCRE, for instance, has a facility to do that but it
   would certainly be overkill to include such a big package with
   SLIME. (Plus, I think slime-apropos should use Emacs regex syntax
   as it is an Emacs package.)

   [I'm offline while I write this but I seem to remember that I've
   somewhere (in CLOCC?) seen a CL package for Emacs Lisp. Does my
   memory serve me right? Does this package provide Emacs Lisp regular
   expressions for CL?]

3. My hack matches on the returned "designator" and thus a regex like
   "ke.*ns" will match a symbol like KERNEL:CONS-TYPE, i.e. package
   prefixes aren't currently treated consistently.

4. The hack pops up an empty *SLIME Apropos* buffer if there's no
   match - no good.

Anyway, what do you think about this?

Cheers,
Edi.


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