[slime-devel] Emacs command for loading Slime and application

[Helmut Eller]

Nicolas Neuss <Nicolas.Neuss at iwr.uni-heidelberg.de> writes:

> CL-USER> *READ-DEFAULT-FLOAT-FORMAT*
> SINGLE-FLOAT
>
> When I then set the default format manually in the REPL, it is reset by
> `M-x slime'.

That could be a bug or a feature depending on your expectations.

Changing *READ-DEFAULT-FLOAT-FORMAT* globally is rather hard in SBCL.
SBCL's native top level loop is executed within
with-rebound-io-syntax, i.e. most reader variables have a non-toplevel
binding in the initial thread and all our threads are spawned from
that thread.  In SBCL, a new threads inherits (all?) the dynamic
bindings of the parent thread and so, if you change
*READ-DEFAULT-FLOAT-FORMAT* in one thread, the change it will not be
visible in other threads.  M-x slime also creates a new threads and
the bindings are those from the initial thread.

I've heard that SBCL's inheriting semantics for dynamic variables are
an ongoing debate, maybe they change it.

Helmut.