[slime-devel] Re: SLIME+Allegro on Windows

[Helmut Eller]

* Peter Seibel [2006-03-05 22:58+0100] writes:

> So, don't most (all?) Lisp's have some way to accept the name of a
> file to load as a command line argument? 

Yes, but the details vary a lot.  Also some people use shell scripts
instead of the actual Lisp executable which complicates the issue.

> I understand that in the
> early days it was good to just use the *inferior-lisp* machinary
> because it was there and, when SLIME was in early development, it gave
> you a way to talk to Lisp when all else failed. Maybe the time has
> come to break free of the *inferior-lisp* legacy? Assuming I figure
> out a clean way to have SLIME pass the file-to-load-on-startup info to
> the spawned Lisp, is there anything else that would be lost by
> abandoning *inferior-lisp*?

It shouldn't be hard to offer both options to load and start swank:
the traditional way which sends "(load swank)" to the inferior
listener and a way to load swank via command line args.

Abandoning the *inferior-lisp* buffer is a somewhat different question
and doesn't dependent very much on how we load swank.  We could
probably redirect the output that is currently sent to the
*inferior-lisp* buffer to the *slime-repl* buffer.  Redirecting input
would be more difficult.  It's a bigger step than changing the way how
swank is started.

Helmut.