[slime-devel] Jump to source code

[Thomas F. Burdick]

Edi Weitz writes:
 > On Fri, 18 Mar 2005 04:27:00 +0200, hww <hww at inbox.ru> wrote:
 > 
 > > This is bad.
 > > What is the problem with file without definition?
 > 
 > A file without function definitions is not a program, that's very
 > simple.

Well, kind of.  The toplevel is good for interactively poking at
things, but it can also be nice to do that in a buffer.  Using Squeak
Smalltalk a few years ago, I got the habit of testing things that way.
I still do that because then I have a record of what I did to test my
program, and I can later pare it down into a test suite much more
easily than writing one from scratch.  C-M-x is kind of half-way
between do-it and print-it, so it works well enough.  I real print-it
like in Squeak would be cool, but I don't think it would really add
anything substantial over what Slime has now (besides just more
newbie-awing cool-factor).

That said, I don't get hww's question.  If you have a buffer full of
disembodied forms you want to evaluate, point to them and say "eval
this", aka C-M-x.  Don't just write scripts.  If you do things that
way, it has the advantage that you *know* where the error was, you're
pointing at it.