[slime-devel] SLIME48: a Swank back end in Scheme48

[Andras Simon]

On Fri, 16 Sep 2005, Brian Mastenbrook wrote:

> On Sep 16, 2005, at 6:14 AM, Helmut Eller wrote:

[...]
> >
> >    Compatibility with other Common Lisps is not a goal.
> >
> > Sadly, the goals shifted a bit since then.
> >
>
> I don't think very many people would agree that this is "sadly". If

That's right and I'm not one of them (I've used slime with five CL
implementations so far). But then it's mainly Helmut (and Luke, and a select
few, of course) who has had to worry about the idiosyncracies of the various
implementations.

> this is the way you feel, however, I'm sure that there are enough
> people who prefer using SLIME on other Common Lisps to sustain a fork
> of the project.

Would _you_ be willing to put as much thought and care into maintaining SLIME
as Helmut has for the past two years? I think SLIME without Helmut would
be rather slim.

OTOH it'd be great if schemers created a fork of SLIME.


> > I'm not that excited about supporting every Frankenstein Lisp on the
> > planet, just because we can.  And frankly, who wants to use a Lisp
> > which doesn't even have docstrings?
> >
>
> Taylor's goal in this project was to make a good Emacs IDE for
> Scheme48, not to make SLIME support "every Frankenstein Lisp". SLIME
> was just the tool he chose to make this happen.

The problem with Scheme is that there's so many of it. At least the number
of CL implementations is bounded.

My 0.02 HUF (that's 8.0e-5 EUR, if you want to know).

Andras