On Mon, Dec 19, 2005 at 11:53:02AM -0500, Larry Clapp wrote: > On Mon, Dec 19, 2005 at 07:40:07AM -0800, Peter Seibel wrote: > > Larrry, in order to exercise the budding gardener project process, > > can you create a page on the ALU Wiki along the lines of > > > > <http://wiki.alu.org/Fixing_ASDF-INSTALLable_packages> > > > > describing the SLIME-Vim project, with yourself as Champion. The > > point of doing that is to get a clear description of the work put > > down somewhere so other gardeners can see what needs to be done and > > where they might be able to help out. > > http://wiki.alu.org:80/Perl_interface_to_SLIME > > Kind of bare bones at the moment.
On http://wiki.alu.org:80/Perl_interface_to_SLIME?version=3, Peter asked: > ISTR this was discussed on the mailing list, but I don't recall the > resolution. Is there some reason it'd be hard to embedd CLISP or > ECL into Vim as another scripting language? We didn't discuss it here, no. > Then you could write the Vim extension in Common Lisp rather than > Perl. Which seems good for encouraging the use of Lisp and also > presumably would allow you to use more of the existing SWANK code. I looked into this a few months ago and could find no documentation on how to write a Vim interface to another language. I did not feel like figuring it out from the Perl/Python/etc examples already done, so I dropped it, and apparently marked it internally as "too hard". :) Knowing admittedly little about the internals of clisp or ECL, I think clisp would probably be the better choice. (I think) it's smaller, and doesn't require the GNU C Compiler for compilation. Hmmm, on the other hand, ECL has a bytecode compiler, too, so if the user happened to have GCC, ECL could use it; if not, not. I guess I figured: I know Perl. I know Perl could talk to Swank. I know Vim can talk to Perl. If I use Perl, I could start immediately, and as a side product, produce a stand-alone Perl module to talk to Swank. On the other hand, I don't know anything about integrating Vim with another language, or integrating clisp or ECL with another product. Once I did, I'd *still* have to translate slime.el to Vim's editor primitives. Once I did *that*, Vim could talk to Swank ... but nobody else could. The bang-for-the-buck seems pretty low, and the learning curve (for me) seems pretty high. On the third hand, if I did it, then we'd have a popular, world class editor scriptable in Common Lisp, with at least some of the elisp ("ELisp"? "eLisp"?) primitives ported over already. Not a terrible thing. :) I dunno. I like the idea of adding clisp/ECL to Vim, but not right now. I'm talking about planting a nice apple tree and you're telling me "well that's nice, but you have enough space to do a whole orchard; why don't you do that?" :) Anybody else that wants to step out into the field and start planting is welcome to it, of course. I won't stop you, and I'll cheer when you're finished! -- Larry _______________________________________________ Gardeners mailing list [email protected] http://www.lispniks.com/mailman/listinfo/gardeners
