So I thought that I'd post here to keep this particular meme going. I've looked at the Slime/Swank code. Slime frontend - - written in Emacs Lisp and hosted in the Emacs editor - introduces a new editing mode in Emacs - delivers s-expressions to the Swank backend via a TCP port, I guess that the s-exps are probably just plain text over the port (hmm, not quite - there looks to be 6 digits at the start which is the length of the s-exp) - processes the Swank return data
Swank - a remote TCP/IP server that listens on (defaultly) port 4005 - executes the incoming s-expressions and sends the result back to Slime I suspect that it ought to be pretty easy to talk to a running Swank-enabled image, it looks do just be a matter of sending s-expressions of the following form "000015(format t "hi")". It is probably a good idea to snoop the normal communications from Slime<->Swank , I feel that this ought to be trivial to do via some sort of port redirection, but I don't know exactly how to do this yet - I'll look into that next probably. As to the basic design of the Slime for Vim frontend, Larry mentioned writing it in Perl (Vim supports Perl as a scripting language). Should we consider Python? Lots of other applications embed Python, would we be helping other potential Lisp environments by writing the Swank frontend largely in Python? I don't mind either way, just a thought I had. We should aim to provide all the features that the Emacs Slime does, but with more Vim-like key access. I'm sure I've missed at least a few things here though Cheers Brad _______________________________________________ Gardeners mailing list [email protected] http://www.lispniks.com/mailman/listinfo/gardeners
