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

[Taylor Campbell]

   Date: Sat, 17 Sep 2005 01:33:44 +0200 (MEST)
   From: Andras Simon <andras at renyi.hu>

   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.

I don't think that they would have to worry about the Scheme48 Swank
implementation.  Once SLIME48 is fairly stable with respect to
existing SLIME features, I think I could probably maintain its
continual development in the context of SLIME's pretty easily.

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

Can you explain why you think this would be better than (very
non-invasively) adding Scheme support to the regular 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.

So many of it?  SLIME48 is just Scheme48, nothing else.  I have
considered an MIT Scheme Swank implementation, too, which would be
somewhat closer to CL, actually, at least in threading; however, this
is just two Schemes, not the whole Scheme world.  (I don't think there
are many other Schemes that could support or be supported by Swank
anyway in the same way that Scheme48 & MIT Scheme can, by the way.)