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

[Helmut Eller]

* Taylor Campbell [2005-09-17 04:47+0200] writes:

> Is there more interest in maintaining a well-engineered & -specified
> protocol for general Lisp interaction, or in producing just an
> environment for Lisp development in Emacs, regardless of how messy the
> internals are, and without any provision for reuse & extension in
> other directions?  For instance, the notion of utilizing Swank in the
> McCLIM tools has been considered, where those tools would serve as a
> Swank front end, if the protocol were sufficiently general and well-
> abstracted.  (I'm not saying that SLIME should provide this, but
> rather that it may be a worthwhile direction to consider.)

I for one, am not interested in "general Lisp interaction".  Emacs is
the only front-end I want to use anyway.  I'm however interested in
interaction of Emacs with external (possibly non-lisp)
interpreters/debuggers.  Most of the talk about using SLIME for other
things I have heard has not been more than that: talk.  And I think it
would be a bit silly to provide for reuse and extension if there's no
actual application which uses it.

> I see the point about scheme48-mode, but I'm not sure I understand why
> having `package' as a buffer-local variable is unwise.  Can you
> elaborate on that?

It's pretty common to write things like

  (defun foo (package buffer)
    (with-current-buffer buffer
       (frob package)))

and this might not do what you think it does when package is a
buffer-local variable.  Symbols like `package', `module', `buffer',
`string', `list' are problematic names for buffer-local variables.
Let's reserve them for ordinary local variables.

>    Still interested?
>
> Maybe.

Would you please make up your mind, Sir?  Yes or no?