On 03/24/2011 08:39 AM, Thorsten wrote:
Hallo,
it seems to me that elisp and picolisp are close relatives in the lisp
familiy,
Yeah... they both use parens and dynamic binding...
and I wonder if it would be possible to convert elisp code to
picolisp code - and how difficult this would be?
No way, raw translation won't do any good. Porting is required.
There have been apparently successful attempts to convert elisp to
scheme
(http://www-pu.informatik.uni-tuebingen.de/users/knauel/selc-ifl.pdf),
and scheme is very different from elisp.
Not so different if you leave aside the #t #f '() and dynamic binding.
(it would be more troublesome to port stuff from scheme to elisp)
I was thinking about
`refactoring` the text in *.el files to a syntax that picolisp can
understand, but that might be too naive.
All the (1800 ?) primitive C functions in elisp were problematic when
porting elisp to scheme, but maybe thats not the case with picolisp. Of
course the thousands of buffer functions etc are meaningless in
picolisp,
Deppends on what you want to do, but a LOT of elisp code (I'd say most
of it) deppends on buffers (as in data type/structure). If you mean
buffers as in "frames/windows", yeah.. but there's very little of it AFAIK.
since there are no buffers in the gui framework. But maybe one
could connect the conkeror webbrowser (http://conkeror.org/), a fine
javascript browser modeled closely after emacs, to the gui framework of
picolisp and map the emacs buffer commands etc to the related conkeror
concepts (it has buffers, keymaps ...).
Then suddenly many of those emacs modes and libraries would make sense
in picolisp, and with more than 1 million lines of elisp code available
the claims that 'picolisp has no libraries' would stop.
They wouldn't be modeled the picolisp way, nor they'd be specific to it.
Besides... most of emacs is about modes. Most about modes is parsing,
highlighting and indenting (maybe some smart stuff like applying
overlays to hide stuff like in html-mode) and a few macros and
word-delimiters definitions. So.. what's there to port?
Regarding conkeror.. I've used it for a year, but then moved to
vimperator which I find to be quite superior in most aspects.
All this would make sense if there was a picolisp-based-editor, and even
if that were the case, it's not a good idea to mass-rip stuff from emacs
(since emacs is full of contradictions and different criteria)
By the way, these kind of discussions are better in IRC
(#picol...@irc.freenode.net)
- Arm
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