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

[Thomas F. Burdick]

Luke Gorrie writes:
 > Alan Ruttenberg <alanr-l at mumble.net> writes:
 > 
 > > Just a note of support for the general idea of incorporating Taylor's
 > > extension.
 > 
 > I like the idea too. I fired up SLIME48 and was impressed that it did
 > so much stuff without even one line of change in slime.el. Very good!
 > (Didn't handle my ~/.slime-secret though :-)
 > 
 > I sympathise with Helmut too. He is the main one who has been making
 > fixes across lots of different backends instead of just living in one.
 > >From my lazy point of view it's just to use the CMUCL backend and
 > benefit from the portable features that are being added by everybody.
 > 
 > I have one idea about cutting down noise in CVS if it becomes a
 > problem: We could move the Scheme code into a new top-level swank48/
 > directory and add an entry in CVSROOT/modules called 'slime48' to
 > checkout slime/ and swank48/. Just if the CL people tire of seeing
 > scheme files in 'cvs update'.

This sounds a lot like the proposal I had for an amicable fork: why
can't "slime48" be swank48, and share the emacs front-end with slime?
It sounds like slime48 is a terrible misnomer, which is good news to
my ears.  If Scheme48 integration is really as painless as it's been
pitched to be, I don't see any reason why it can't exist as an
amicable swank fork, with any new-feature enabling changes being
propogated back and forth.  Swank and swank/scheme aren't objectively
competing, and given the very positive history of cmucl and sbcl
(which are objectively competing, even if they try to cooperate where
possible), I'd think cooperation between the forks would go well.

-- 
           /|_     .-----------------------.                        
         ,'  .\  / | Free Mumia Abu-Jamal! |
     ,--'    _,'   | Abolish the racist    |
    /       /      | death penalty!        |
   (   -.  |       `-----------------------'
   |     ) |                               
  (`-.  '--.)                              
   `. )----'