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

[Taylor Campbell]

   Date: 16 Sep 2005 16:01:45 +0200
   From: Luke Gorrie <luke at synap.se>

   I've downloaded Scheme48 and will try to take a look and throw in my
   $0.02 this weekend.

Just to be clear, by the way: SLIME48 is currently in an experimental
development state, not really ready for serious use; I'm sure there
are a lot of bugs (like the ones Helmut Eller pointed out regarding
interrupts and continuation re-entrancy), and there are many as yet
unimplemented features as well still, but that Swank can support
Scheme48 (or vice versa, perhaps) is the important element, and bugs &
missing features can be fixed.

                       I don't have any objection in principle and think
   it's great if it will fit together fairly well (not too much impact on
   the shared code). I have been pretty surprised at how little impact
   the other Lisp backends have had when done carefully (compared with
   the #+hell in ilisp). Scheme is of course a bigger step :-)

Actually, I was very surprised to find how easily Scheme48 supported
the ostensibly pretty CL-oriented Swank.  There are a few parts that
expose too much of CL (such as some internal symbol references sent by
the elisp side of Swank, and the #. read syntax used in one place for
presentations), but these are very small and inconsequential.  I think
a useful Scheme48 environment (which SLIME48 is not quite yet, but
which it will be soon) requires very few additions on the SLIME Emacs
side, too; most ASDF or CL package system commands translate directly
to Scheme48's module system, which is one of the most important parts
of any environment for Scheme48.