(I apologize if this is the wrong group for discussing this. I was thinking of posting to help-emacs-windows@gnu.org, but my question is from a developer standpoint more than a user, so...)
Much of my Emacs-time is at work, using MS Windows. For some small hacks (those who read gnu.emacs.sources might have seen some of them) I have needed to access different COM-objects, and the only way to do that seems to be by using an external program, in my case cscript.exe, the command-line VBScript interpreter. The basic operation is to call cscript.exe with a vbscript file name and other arguments, let the script access the objects in question, put data on standard out, and let Emacs parse that data. This works quite well (apart from the overhead of calling the external program and parsing the data) but for each time I need to access a different object I need to write yet another small script for manipulating that particular object. It seems a bit awkward. Basically, what I need is "only" to instantiate different ActiveX/COM-objects and use the methods and properties they provide, not the VBScript programming language itself. I remember reading about someone trying to make Emacs an ActiveX-object, and although that sounds interesting, this is not what I think is needed here. I also remember seeing that Python has some module that is capable of doing ActiveX-work. OK, enough blabbing, here is my question: what would be needed to make it possible doing this more "natively" from Emacs? Is it possible without rewriting major parts of Emacs? Would it be possible to do using some "plug-in" dll? Is anyone else besides be interested in it? In my opinion, it would be quite useful for accessing Windows-specific things like Registry data, automating "ActiveX-enabled" software (both proprietary and Free). Thanks for you time. /Mathias _______________________________________________ Emacs-devel mailing list Emacs-devel@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacs-devel
