[slime-devel] ruby Was: Daily ChangeLog diff

[Helmut Eller]

* Andras Simon [2009-02-19 14:01+0100] writes:

> I'm not sure where (or how far) you want to take it, but this looks like very
> good news to me! Is it ready for alpha-testing?

If you want to use it, you have to fill in many missing parts.

This was primarily a exercise to learn a bit of Ruby.  The file
implements only very little functionality.  The only command that works
is slime-eval-region.  The debugger isn't a real debugger it just
displays the backtrace (without local variables) from the exception
object.

Certain commands, like slime-eval-last-expression, would need some elisp
code which understands Ruby's syntax a bit better.  Or perhaps it would
be better to have different commands like eval-current-line because "the
last expression" is not a very useful concept in a infix syntax.

> I.e., are you ready for
> taking questions and bug reports from clueless users?

I can answer questions, but I don't have a good idea how a decent
Slime-for-Ruby should look like.  E.g. tab-completion for method-names
seems to be hard(er) to implement in Ruby because most names are
interpreted relative to some module/class while in Lisp most
function-names are global symbols.

My impression was that Emacs's ruby-mode works quite well with irb in a
comint buffer and hence, something like Slime is less necessary.  I was
also pleasantly surprised that Matz seems to be one of the authors of
ruby-mode.

Helmut.