Firstly, I want to thank everyone who tried to help me with my previous message.
I think I could get the problem licked if we could do it this way.
Lets pretend I have nothing on my system (which is essentially where it stands now) I just installed Red Hat 7.1 with nothing fancy, I haven't done anything to emacs.
What would I need to do (step by step) to get emacs to allow me to program in Common LISP?
Nonzero...@hotmail.com (Nonzero) writes: > What would I need to do (step by step) to get emacs to allow me to > program in Common LISP?
First, get a Lisp environment. CMUCL is alright, and is free. There should be RPMs of it somewhere. (Several alternatives exist, but for learning Common Lisp, CMUCL should be okay. Allegro Common Lisp is more, um, professional quality, and commercial, but you can get a free trial version of it.)
Then I recommend you get ilisp from from http://ilisp.sourceforge.net/. It's a very handy Lisp-editing mode for Emacs. If you're going with Allegro Lisp, you don't need this, it comes with its own Emacs-mode, called eli.
There are full instructions for setting up ilisp in the accompanying documentation which should be enough to get you started even if you're not experienced with Emacs.
> Firstly, I want to thank everyone who tried to help me with my > previous message.
> I think I could get the problem licked if we could do it this way.
> Lets pretend I have nothing on my system (which is essentially where > it stands now) > I just installed Red Hat 7.1 with nothing fancy, > I haven't done anything to emacs.
> What would I need to do (step by step) to get emacs to allow me to > program in Common LISP?
Get a CL implementation for Linux. I recommend CMUCL, or CLISP (CMUCL, I believe, is more standards compliant). Probably the least effort upfront is to get the CMUCL .deb from Debian, and all the related .debs, use alien to convert to rpm, and install (WARNING: Effort will be required later when trying to fiddle with your installation). Another way is to get the standard CMUCL distribution from cmucl.cons.org.
Get ILISP for your particular emacs (I can't remember if the standard distribution has GNU emacs and Xemacs ports included). Install it in the correct manner (See package installation guidelines in your emacs, and the full guidelines that come with ILISP). Note that you'll have to work out where stuff is to install ILISP. M-x ILISP will get you on your way. Explore menus and stuff.
-- Pierre R. Mai <p...@acm.org> http://www.pmsf.de/pmai/ The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents. -- Nathaniel Borenstein
> Firstly, I want to thank everyone who tried to help me with my > previous message.
> I think I could get the problem licked if we could do it this way.
> Lets pretend I have nothing on my system (which is essentially where > it stands now) > I just installed Red Hat 7.1 with nothing fancy, > I haven't done anything to emacs.
> What would I need to do (step by step) to get emacs to allow me to > program in Common LISP?
> Thank you in advance for your patience.
> -Nonzero
I think there is a slight misconception here:
1. Emacs is a text editor (and it can do many other things), and it is mainly written in a special Lisp dialect which is called Emacs Lisp or Elisp.
2. You can customize and extend Emacs by programming in Elisp.
3. Elisp is not an ANSI Common Lisp (which is the dominating dialect used to program in Lisp nowadays) and it is generally not used to write stand-alone Lisp programs.
4. A couple of ANSI CL implementations for Linux are available. These include CMUCL, SBCL, CLISP, LispWorks, and Allegro CL.
5. Emacs can be used as a very comfortable IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for all of these implementations, especially if you use it together with ILISP, which is an Emacs extension.
* Nonzero...@hotmail.com (Nonzero) | What would I need to do (step by step) to get emacs to allow me to | program in Common LISP?
1 Deinstall RedHat. 2 Install Debian (www.debian.org). 3 Install any of the numerous Common Lisp packages available for Debian. 4 Get a real user name on a real ISP (optional). 5 Enjoy.
Debian is the Linux software developer's choice, Common Lisp included. If you are not up to installing Debian, take care of that problem first -- the installation documentation is extensive and so good that you should at least get some needed training in reading such things. If you need help with this, feel free to explain what you have tried and how the results did not match your expectations, and someone will most probably help you change your expectations or suggest what you should try to do.
No, wait, step 4 is not really optional if want people to help you.
/// -- Norway is now run by a priest from the fundamentalist Christian People's Party, the fifth largest party representing one eighth of the electorate. -- The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers. -- Richard Hamming
(1) SBCL is another good CL implementation, which is forked from CMUCL.
(2) If you want to use cCLan packages (I think that work is being done on converting it to optionally use RPM instead of Dpkg), then it will be very difficult for you to use CMUCL, because the version of CMUCL in Debian unstable which cCLan packages depend on doesn't compile cleanly. You will have to use SBCL or CLISP until the version of CMUCL that cCLan depends on compiles cleanly. (Note that this applies *only* if you plan to use cCLan packages.)
(3) ILISP doesn't work out of the tarball with Emacs 21. After some help from the people in the #emacs channel of irc.openprojects.net in determining that the problems were caused by ILISP's custom completion packages and grepping the ILISP source, I found this solution: (setq ilisp-*prefix-match* t) I'm not sure if it is the right solution, but it works for me (tm).
-- BPT <b...@tunes.org> /"\ ASCII Ribbon Campaign backronym for Linux: \ / No HTML or RTF in mail Linux Is Not Unix X No MS-Word in mail Meme plague ;) ---------> / \ Respect Open Standards
