[slime-devel] slime for non-CLs?

[Christophe Rhodes]

Hi,

I was at a conference last week, and spent the boring bits hacking; one
of the things I've got at least partially done is a swank implementation
for R (the statistical array-based language).  Bits that work include:
  * REPL
  * sldb
    + backtrace
    + display of locals
    + invoking restarts by number
    + throw to toplevel
(basically nothing else works)

R is an interesting language and environment: it's almost a lisp --
almost a CL in some respects.  It has generic functions, multimethods
and multiple dispatch; it has conditions, handlers and restarts; it has
eval and read ("parse").  In fact it has almost everything other than a
compiler (but on the other hand, it basically has fexprs...).

Since I plan to use R for Real Work in future, and since the default R
environment under emacs is OK but nothing to write home about (and the
debugger is actively painful), I can see myself developing and
maintaining this swank implementation for a while.  Given this, would
there be any objections to keeping it under contrib/ within slime?

(I will likely also be asking a similar question of the R project, as to
whether keeping development there makes any sense.  I understand that
there's a certain amount of overlap between R types and Lispers -- there
was even a proof-of-concept implementation of an R-to-CL compiler in
2006)

Cheers,

Christophe