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

[Taylor Campbell]

   Date: Sat, 17 Sep 2005 12:18:37 +0200
   From: Helmut Eller <heller at common-lisp.net>

   * 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.

Actually, there has been a bit of real code written for the McCLIM
tools that uses Swank.  I don't know many details about it, though.

   > 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.

That makes sense.  Would it be OK if the lines were changed to
something like -*- mode: scheme; scheme48-package: ... -*-?  (The
package local variable is very useful in Scheme48 development -- in
the absence of IN-PACKAGE forms, which are nonsensical with Scheme48's
module system, the information provided greatly speeds development.)

   >    Still interested?
   >
   > Maybe.

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

I'm still interested.  I'll maintain a separate Darcs repository just
in case, though, it should ever become apparent that migration away
from SLIME's source control be necessary.