[slime-devel] swank-lispworks patch and using slime-repl with Lispworks

[Sidney Markowitz]

Martin Simmons wrote, On 16/1/09 6:27 AM:
> Thanks, I've merged this into CVS with minor changes.

Wonderful!

> Where is the this documentation kept?  I couldn't find anything about
> LispWorks Personal Edition in the SLIME CVS.

There isn't specific mention of LispWorks Personal Edition there. When I
searched for how to use SLIME with LispWorks Personal Edition what I
found was 1) LispWorks 5.1 online documentation that says that SLIME is
not supported by LispWorks Personal Edition; 2) Bill Clementson's blog
posts that start around 2004 that described how he got SLIME to work
with LispWorks 4.3 Personal Edition by starting up LispWorks, starting
up a swank server in it, then connecting emacs to that. In other words,
using LispWorks Personal Edition like a remote Lisp, which allows SLIME
to work even though the Lisp GUI is running. Bill was using it on a Mac
and described using Applescript to automate the start up of LispWorks
and initial load of a ~/.lispworks file even though the Personal Edition
does not provide a way to automatically load an init file; 3) SLIME
documentation about running with a remote Lisp.

I guess I should have said that what I gleaned from existing
documentation about running SLIME with LispWorks Personal Edition was no
longer accurate, as there was no specific documentation for it.

The inaccuracies or missing pieces in the current SLIME documentation
about running with a remote Lisp, unless I missed some things, are: No
explicit mention that the Lisp needs to load swank-loader.lisp then
evaluate (swank-loader:init) then (swank:create-server); No explicit
mention that all this is done for you if you use asdf to load swank.asd
from SLIME's distribution and then call (swank:create-server); No
mention that you have to load slime-repl in setup-slime if you want to
run with a remote Lisp because you don't see the Lisp's native REPL when
you run that way and slime-repl has been moved out to contrib (Is that
accurate, or do I just not know how to get a Lisp's REPL when it is run
remotely?).

And I think that the LispWorks documentation could be updated to say
that SLIME runs with the Personal Edition only when configured to
connect to it as a remote Lisp, not to make the misleading statement
that it is "not supported".

While typing this I noticed that the comment in swank.asd still says
(swank:create-swank-server) even though the name has been changed to
swank:create-server. That should be updated.

 Sidney Markowitz
 http://www.sidney.com