lisp editors

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Dave

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Jun 23, 2000, 3:00:00 AM6/23/00
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What's your editor of choice?
notepad?...emacs?
Has anybody used lispPad yet? Is it even available yet?


Is there any way to get visual lisp without upgrading to acad2000? I can't
recall what visuallisp was called before autodesk bought it, but is there a
chance of getting it somewhere?

Thanks!
DR

Espen Vestre

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Jun 23, 2000, 3:00:00 AM6/23/00
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"Dave" <stee...@bellsouth.net> writes:

> What's your editor of choice?

SEdit, but since its availability has been severely restricted
for the last 10 years ;-), then of course: emacs!

--
(espen)

Simon Brooke

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Jun 23, 2000, 3:00:00 AM6/23/00
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Espen Vestre <espen@*do-not-spam-me*.vestre.net> writes:

SEdit! foo. DEdit rules.

--
si...@jasmine.org.uk (Simon Brooke) http://www.jasmine.org.uk/~simon/

;; I'd rather live in sybar-space

The Glauber

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Jun 23, 2000, 3:00:00 AM6/23/00
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In article <m2zooc3...@gododdin.internal.jasmine.org.uk>,

Simon Brooke <si...@jasmine.org.uk> wrote:
> Espen Vestre <espen@*do-not-spam-me*.vestre.net> writes:
>
> > "Dave" <stee...@bellsouth.net> writes:
> >
> > > What's your editor of choice?
> >
> > SEdit, but since its availability has been severely restricted
> > for the last 10 years ;-), then of course: emacs!
>
> SEdit! foo. DEdit rules.


Vim with :set lisp!

--
Glauber Ribeiro
thegl...@my-deja.com
"Opinions stated are my own and not representative of Experian"


Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.

Tim Bradshaw

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Jun 23, 2000, 3:00:00 AM6/23/00
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* Espen Vestre wrote:

> SEdit, but since its availability has been severely restricted
> for the last 10 years ;-), then of course: emacs!

SEdit never did handle CL that well... But seriously, I hope someone
wrote something about it, because it's the only structure editor I've
ever seen that was reasonably usable.

(I recently threw away a tape with my last dmachine sysout on it,
sigh.)

--tim

David Bakhash

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Jun 23, 2000, 3:00:00 AM6/23/00
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"Dave" <stee...@bellsouth.net> writes:

> What's your editor of choice? notepad?...emacs? Has anybody used


> lispPad yet? Is it even available yet?

this is a religious question. Like most of them, there are probably a
dozen threads or so in the last few years on the topic of which editor
is best for Lisp development. Still, it's an important question.
Especially with the vast number of (new) editors popping up in the Linux
community (from GNOME, KDE, and just random free stuff), it's nice to
ask what other people are using, just to see if there's something out
there that you're missing out on, just because you don't know about it.

I still believe that XEmacs is the best overall editor for Common Lisp
programming. Here are the following reasons:

1) ilisp-mode is mostly universal, and works with most major CL
implementations.
2) If you're using Franz's ACL, then they ship with the eli/ directory
containing a nice UI.
3) You get to program your own extensions in elisp, which can be very
similar to CL, and which can call most CL functions.
4) XEmacs works in Win32 and virtually all Unix environments.
5) XEmacs will simply never die out.
6) You can find ways to hack the editor to do what you want it to do
just about every time, and often, if it's a useful hack, it's
probably already been done, and there's someone on comp.emacs.xemacs
willing to give you a hand.
7) Since CL programming (and virtually _all_ programming) is often done
along with a variety of other languages (e.g. Perl, Csh, C, Java,
etc.), it's nice to have an editor which handles other languages as
well.
8) XEmacs is the most customizable editor that exists, as far as I know.
9) w3-mode, which is a simple web browser, is a standard package for
XEmacs that works well, and lets you read hyperlinked HTML docs such
as the CLHS while programming -- and all in the same editor. There
are even modes for (X)Emacs which allow you to quickly fetch
definitions from the CLHS with a simple command.

Besides those, it's free. If you know what you're doing, you _never_
need to use the mouse (which is a productivity thing). I think it's the
obvious choice, and as I've tested out many editors, XEmacs is my
(religious) choice.

hope this helps,
dave

William Deakin

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Jun 23, 2000, 3:00:00 AM6/23/00
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Tim wrote:
> SEdit never did handle CL that well... But seriously, I hope someone
> wrote something about it, because it's the only structure editor I've
> ever seen that was reasonably usable.

Have you tried amaya?

;) will

Fernando

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Jun 23, 2000, 3:00:00 AM6/23/00
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"Tim Bradshaw" <t...@cley.com> escribió en el mensaje
news:ey3zooc...@cley.com...

> * Espen Vestre wrote:
>
> > SEdit, but since its availability has been severely restricted
> > for the last 10 years ;-), then of course: emacs!
>
> SEdit never did handle CL that well... But seriously, I hope someone
> wrote something about it, because it's the only structure editor I've
> ever seen that was reasonably usable.

Is this what you guys are talking about? http://www.sedit.com

The Glauber

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Jun 23, 2000, 3:00:00 AM6/23/00
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In article <buL45.202$G84....@m2newsread.uni2.es>,
"Fernando" <f...@mindless.com> wrote:

[...]


> Is this what you guys are talking about? http://www.sedit.com

Yikes! that seems to be a clone of an IBM mainframe editor with REXX as
extension language!

The Glauber

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Jun 23, 2000, 3:00:00 AM6/23/00
to
In article <c29k8fg...@nerd-xing.mit.edu>,
David Bakhash <ca...@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
[...]

> as I've tested out many editors, XEmacs is my
> (religious) choice.

I've used emacs a couple of times, in both Unix and Windoze. The main
thing that frustrated me was having to deal with a heretic version of
Lisp. That is, i'm trying to learn the Only True Lisp and having to
deal with this heretical beast at the same time. So i came back to vi
(Vim, in fact) both times. With Vim i get syntax-coloring and
indentation, and that's pretty much all i need.

There also seems to be a Jihad going on betwen GNU Emacs and Xemacs.

As nice as it is to have an extension language, i think i can live
without one in my editor. But if you do use emacs, you can use
the "viper" package and it will make you swear you are using vi (or at
the very least, it will make you swear!).

g (writing this while the newest version of Xemacs downloads...)

Joe Marshall

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Jun 23, 2000, 3:00:00 AM6/23/00
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David Bakhash <ca...@alum.mit.edu> writes:

> I still believe that XEmacs is the best overall editor for Common Lisp
> programming.

If you don't have Zmacs, I suppose, but it just isn't the same.

The Glauber

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Jun 23, 2000, 3:00:00 AM6/23/00
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In article <8j0511$90c$1...@nnrp1.deja.com>,
The Glauber <thegl...@my-deja.com> wrote:
[...]

> With Vim i get syntax-coloring and
> indentation, and that's pretty much all i need.

And "()" matching, of course, how could i forget to mention it?

Tim Bradshaw

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Jun 23, 2000, 3:00:00 AM6/23/00
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* Fernando wrote:

> Is this what you guys are talking about? http://www.sedit.com

No. SEdit was a lisp structure editor for Interlisp-D.

--tim

Simon Brooke

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Jun 23, 2000, 3:00:00 AM6/23/00
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"Fernando" <f...@mindless.com> writes:

> "Tim Bradshaw" <t...@cley.com> escribió en el mensaje
> news:ey3zooc...@cley.com...
> > * Espen Vestre wrote:
> >
> > > SEdit, but since its availability has been severely restricted
> > > for the last 10 years ;-), then of course: emacs!
> >
> > SEdit never did handle CL that well... But seriously, I hope someone
> > wrote something about it, because it's the only structure editor I've
> > ever seen that was reasonably usable.
>

> Is this what you guys are talking about? http://www.sedit.com

No. SEdit was a curious hybrid between a text and a structure editor
which was introduced in the Medley release of InterLISP. It was
intended to replace DEdit, the editor in previous releases of
InterLISP-D, which was a pure structure editor. In a structure editor
you edit syntactically complete elements of structure, rather than
strings of text.

Robert Monfera

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Jun 24, 2000, 3:00:00 AM6/24/00
to
Simon Brooke wrote:

> No. SEdit was a curious hybrid between a text and a structure editor
> which was introduced in the Medley release of InterLISP. It was
> intended to replace DEdit, the editor in previous releases of
> InterLISP-D, which was a pure structure editor. In a structure editor
> you edit syntactically complete elements of structure, rather than
> strings of text.

Are there materials available about it? Recollections? Screenshots or
maybe an illustrated user's guide? Is it possible to run InterLisp /
DWIM these days?

Robert

David Bakhash

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Jun 24, 2000, 3:00:00 AM6/24/00
to
as I said from the start. it's mostly religious, and there's no clear
"best", since that's mostly an opinion.

But your description of Emacs Lisp as some sort of bastardized language
is not an opinion I share. There's history there, and there are reasons
why it is the way it is. For an editor, it's a pretty powerful set of
extensions. Having written a couple of elisp programs, and seen how
much slower they are (and knowing _why_ they are to some extent) is not
such a great feeling. But Emacs Lisp and CL are similar in some
respects. I think that the main places where elisp is crippled is:

1) no package system
2) dynamic scope everywhere
3) reader, and reader-related functions, objects, etc.
4) missing some basic types (e.g. bignums)

actually, when I started writing, I thought that more major differences
would come to mind, but I think those are the major ones. For example,
the cl.el stuff takes care of implementing a lot of the CL functions, so
one can't really argue that elisp is missing _tons_ of CL stuff. Of the
stuff that's not in cl.el, but is part of CL, a lot of it is out there
(for example, I wrote cl-array.el, and that implements CL-style arrays
for the most part). Then, there's an implementation of CLOS (I think by
the same guy who wrote the java dev. environment, maybe called JDE?)

Not only that, but there is even a CL-style lisp reader out there
(cl-read.el) that's part of XEmacs, as far as I know. there's also a
lexical-let in cl.el. Basically, you really kinda have to explore elisp
to make it look and act like CL, but if you try hard enough, you'll find
that there are ways. For now, it's the next best thing until they
finally decide to start using CL for Emacs. I think that it'll happen
first for XEmacs. I think the GNU Emacs people are more into Guile than
the XEmacs people (some of whom, actually, were involved with Lucid).
When and if XEmacs gets ported to using CL, I'm sure that many people
will offer to go through the library code, fix up the brokenness, add
the asterisks (i.e. *<var>*) to the variables and params, the plus signs
(i.e. +<constant>+) to the constants, and hopefully fix up the way
certain variables are scoped. Actually, it's not easy to fix the stuff
up. That's why I use cl.el heavily, even if I could make my elisp code
much faster by _not_ using it. It's b/c I want it to be easy to port to
CL properly when the transition happens.

I think that between cl-array, cl-read, clos, and the major stuff in
cl.el, you can mostly just write in what might be considered a limited,
slightly crippled, slow version of CL.

If there are other compatibility packages that I'm not aware of, people
should feel free to mention them in this post.

dave

Marco Antoniotti

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Jun 25, 2000, 3:00:00 AM6/25/00
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The Glauber <thegl...@my-deja.com> writes:

> In article <m2zooc3...@gododdin.internal.jasmine.org.uk>,
> Simon Brooke <si...@jasmine.org.uk> wrote:
> > Espen Vestre <espen@*do-not-spam-me*.vestre.net> writes:
> >

> > > "Dave" <stee...@bellsouth.net> writes:
> > >
> > > > What's your editor of choice?
> > >

> > > SEdit, but since its availability has been severely restricted
> > > for the last 10 years ;-), then of course: emacs!
> >

> > SEdit! foo. DEdit rules.
>
>
> Vim with :set lisp!

Nahhhh! Emacs with M-x vi-mode.

--
Marco Antoniotti ===========================================

The Glauber

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Jun 25, 2000, 3:00:00 AM6/25/00
to
In article <c29bt0q...@nerd-xing.mit.edu>,

David Bakhash <ca...@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
> as I said from the start. it's mostly religious, and there's no clear
> "best", since that's mostly an opinion.
>
> But your description of Emacs Lisp as some sort of bastardized
language
> is not an opinion I share. There's history there, and there are
[...]


Just a quick aside, i didn't say bastardized, i said heretical (this is
a religious discussion, after all :-)).

I'm trying to learn Common Lisp and afraid that the Elisp stuff will
distract me too much. When i feel more comfortable with CL, i may try
emacs again. I just like the editing philosophy behind VI better (but
then, Viper takes care of making Emacs work that way).


glauber

Reini Urban

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Jun 25, 2000, 3:00:00 AM6/25/00
to
Dave wrote:
>What's your editor of choice?
>notepad?...emacs?

This guy got you, folks. It was an AutoLISP question :)

dave,
comp.cad.autocad is the appropriate newsgroup.
see the faq entry about editors in my sig.

>Has anybody used lispPad yet? Is it even available yet?

I think so. ask tony.

>Is there any way to get visual lisp without upgrading to acad2000? I can't
>recall what visuallisp was called before autodesk bought it, but is there a
>chance of getting it somewhere?

yes, version 4 from your autodesk dealer.
vital lisp 3.2.
maybe some european dealers still have it on stock.
cadiware.ch or abacus.no maybe
--
Reini Urban
http://xarch.tu-graz.ac.at/autocad/news/faq/autolisp.html

Reini Urban

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Jun 25, 2000, 3:00:00 AM6/25/00
to
The Glauber wrote:
>In article <c29k8fg...@nerd-xing.mit.edu>,

> David Bakhash <ca...@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
>[...]
>> as I've tested out many editors, XEmacs is my
>> (religious) choice.
>
>I've used emacs a couple of times, in both Unix and Windoze. The main
>thing that frustrated me was having to deal with a heretic version of
>Lisp. That is, i'm trying to learn the Only True Lisp and having to
>deal with this heretical beast at the same time. So i came back to vi
>(Vim, in fact) both times. With Vim i get syntax-coloring and

>indentation, and that's pretty much all i need.
>
>There also seems to be a Jihad going on betwen GNU Emacs and Xemacs.

no religion for me. just bare facts. rms will never accept dynamic
loading of compiled modules (dll, so), which XEmacs emodules do.
similar to other "improvements" he will turn down.

you can extent XEmacs virtually into any direction without the need to
recompile it with your own private extension. e.g. I needed and added
Win32 registry modules, DLL loading, OLE Automation and (later) a FFI to
be completely independent. but after the third update or so I got tired
to do so. DLL's are only possible with XEmacs.

On the other hand emacs works better in some other aspects. e.g. under
nt the speedbar works okay, info and so on. this is the good side of
RMS, it simply works and is consistent.

both are IMHO ancient and poor compared to other Win32 IDE's I used and
even bought before, but it's customizable and free and has a lot of
users.
for example multiedit pro is also fully customizable, with a script
compiler, debugger, good GUI and even a FFI, a lot of users. but it's
not emacs and all of its goodies. and it is not programmable in lisp :)

Erik Naggum

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Jun 25, 2000, 3:00:00 AM6/25/00
to
* The Glauber <thegl...@my-deja.com>

| I'm trying to learn Common Lisp and afraid that the Elisp stuff will
| distract me too much.

I doubt that, but it may depend on how you decide that something is
"Common Lisp". My suggestion is: always have the standard reference
available, look up stuff you are not completely certain about, and
you should be safe.

#:Erik
--
If this is not what you expected, please alter your expectations.

Simon Brooke

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Jun 25, 2000, 3:00:00 AM6/25/00
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Robert Monfera <mon...@fisec.com> writes:

Oh! DWIM! Happy days. For a seriously dyslexic hacker like myself,
DWIM was wonderful.

I never used SEdit to any great extent because I didn't like it. DEdit
pretty-printed the definition to be edited into a window. Attached to
the right side of the window was a permanent vertical strip menu (or
pallette) of operations on structure, and attached to the bottom a
smaller typein buffer. The pretty-printed layout used different fonts,
sizes and weights to hilight things like comments, arglists and so
on. Clicking once into the display selected the form clicked on (an
atom, number or string of clicked on directly, a list if either the
openeing or closing bracket was selected). Double clicking would
select the next enclosing form, and so on. An operation (I've
forgotten how envoked) copied the selected form into the typein
buffer, and operations selected from the palette allowed the contents
of the typein buffer, if a syntactically complete unit, to rpelace the
currently selected form, or link ahead of it or behind it in its
enclosing list. Further options on the palette allowed the list
structure of the selection to be manipulated.

The only downside that I ever saw of in-core editing is the
representation of comments. In InterLISP comments were held in forms,
which carried with it the risk that with sloppy programming something
might evaluate to value-of-comment. I have defended this practice in
the past but the truth is it was not an elegant hack. Richard Barbour
(I think) used to have a Common LISP product (I think called 'Procyon
Common LISP' which allowed in-core editing and which stored comments
on a structure held on a property of the symbol which was the
function's name, which is a slightly more elegant hack.

Xerox spun off a company called 'Envos' which tried to flog Medley on
Windows/X86 for a while. I did a serious Web searh for it a couple of
weeks ago but didn't come up with anything. Searching for Envos on
Xerox' web site turned up only some investors' reports in PDF format
which I didn't bother to read; searching for Interlisp on the Xerox
site produces only some old research papers and on the BBN site finds
nothing. The 'envos.com' domain is registered to someone called Joe
Magera who lists a Hotmail address. The Interlisp.com domain appears
to be held by a cybersquatter. So it looks like the product is
dead. I wonder if there would be any point in approaching Xerox and
BBN to see whether they would be prepared to open source the code?

;; Our modern industrial economy takes a mountain covered with trees,
;; lakes, running streams and transforms it into a mountain of junk,
;; garbage, slime pits, and debris. -- Edward Abbey

Rainer Joswig

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Jun 25, 2000, 3:00:00 AM6/25/00
to
In article <m24s6ig...@gododdin.internal.jasmine.org.uk>, Simon
Brooke <si...@jasmine.org.uk> wrote:

> Magera who lists a Hotmail address. The Interlisp.com domain appears
> to be held by a cybersquatter. So it looks like the product is
> dead. I wonder if there would be any point in approaching Xerox and
> BBN to see whether they would be prepared to open source the code?

For Medley (and related stuff) from Venue look here:

http://Top2bottom.net/venue.html

--
Rainer Joswig, BU Partner,
ISION Internet AG, Steinhöft 9, 20459 Hamburg, Germany
Tel: +49 40 3070 2950, Fax: +49 40 3070 2999
Email: mailto:rainer...@ision.net WWW: http://www.ision.net/

Erik Naggum

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Jun 25, 2000, 3:00:00 AM6/25/00
to
* The Glauber <thegl...@my-deja.com>

| There also seems to be a Jihad going on betwen GNU Emacs and Xemacs.

The willingness to describe things as "religious" is only evidence
of the poster's lack of ability to perceive the underlying issues.

Nothing good can come of describing something as "religious" or in
religious terms: It leads to counter-productive meta-discussions.

Marco Antoniotti

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Jun 25, 2000, 3:00:00 AM6/25/00
to

rur...@sbox.tu-graz.ac.at (Reini Urban) writes:

> Dave wrote:
> >What's your editor of choice?
> >notepad?...emacs?
>
> This guy got you, folks. It was an AutoLISP question :)
>
> dave,
> comp.cad.autocad is the appropriate newsgroup.
> see the faq entry about editors in my sig.

I don't understand your answer. What is out there that is *not*
editable by (X)Emacs or od? :)

Cheers

--
Marco Antoniotti ===========================================

Tim Bradshaw

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Jun 25, 2000, 3:00:00 AM6/25/00
to
* The Glauber wrote:

> I'm trying to learn Common Lisp and afraid that the Elisp stuff will

> distract me too much. When i feel more comfortable with CL, i may try
> emacs again. I just like the editing philosophy behind VI better (but
> then, Viper takes care of making Emacs work that way).

I learnt CL and emacs lisp at the same time, and it was never a
problem that I remember.

--tim

Tom Breton

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Jun 25, 2000, 3:00:00 AM6/25/00
to
David Bakhash <ca...@alum.mit.edu> writes:

> as I said from the start. it's mostly religious, and there's no clear
> "best", since that's mostly an opinion.
>
> But your description of Emacs Lisp as some sort of bastardized language

> is not an opinion I share. There's history there, and there are reasons
> why it is the way it is. For an editor, it's a pretty powerful set of
> extensions. Having written a couple of elisp programs, and seen how
> much slower they are (and knowing _why_ they are to some extent) is not
> such a great feeling. But Emacs Lisp and CL are similar in some
> respects. I think that the main places where elisp is crippled is:
>
> 1) no package system
> 2) dynamic scope everywhere
> 3) reader, and reader-related functions, objects, etc.

cl-read will do that. Unfortunately it could not be made part of the
emacs distribution because nobody could find Guido Bosch, but it's out
there.

> 4) missing some basic types (e.g. bignums)
>
> actually, when I started writing, I thought that more major differences
> would come to mind, but I think those are the major ones. For example,
> the cl.el stuff takes care of implementing a lot of the CL functions, so
> one can't really argue that elisp is missing _tons_ of CL stuff. Of the
> stuff that's not in cl.el, but is part of CL, a lot of it is out there
> (for example, I wrote cl-array.el, and that implements CL-style arrays
> for the most part). Then, there's an implementation of CLOS (I think by
> the same guy who wrote the java dev. environment, maybe called JDE?)

Called Eieio, by Eric M. Ludlam

> Not only that, but there is even a CL-style lisp reader out there
> (cl-read.el) that's part of XEmacs, as far as I know.

OK, you already know cl-read.

> there's also a
> lexical-let in cl.el. Basically, you really kinda have to explore elisp
> to make it look and act like CL, but if you try hard enough, you'll find
> that there are ways. For now, it's the next best thing until they
> finally decide to start using CL for Emacs. I think that it'll happen
> first for XEmacs. I think the GNU Emacs people are more into Guile than
> the XEmacs people (some of whom, actually, were involved with
> Lucid).

Oddly enuff, there's a Scheme called librep that's derived from Elisp
in the first place, but I've heard no discussion about whether that
would be a more attainable target than changing to Guile/Scheme.

From what I saw, ISTM it'd have some advantages in that library
functions match Elisp more closely. But of course GNU wants Guile to
be a common language and library, which has its advantages.

--
Tom Breton, http://world.std.com/~tob
Not using "gh" since 1997. http://world.std.com/~tob/ugh-free.html
Some vocal people in cll make frequent, hasty personal attacks, but if
you killfile them cll becomes usable.

The Glauber

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Jun 25, 2000, 3:00:00 AM6/25/00
to
In article <31709212...@naggum.no>,

Erik Naggum <er...@naggum.no> wrote:
> * The Glauber <thegl...@my-deja.com>
> | There also seems to be a Jihad going on betwen GNU Emacs and Xemacs.
>
> The willingness to describe things as "religious" is only evidence
> of the poster's lack of ability to perceive the underlying issues.


I think in this case it's more of a recognition that some issues won't
ever be settled.

Not that i claim to understand the underlying issues. In fact, i can
barely understand the overlying ones.


> Nothing good can come of describing something as "religious" or in
> religious terms: It leads to counter-productive meta-discussions.


Well, there is such as thing as religion, and there are preferences that
are based on personal taste and not on rigorous analysis.

glauber


---
Glauber Ribeiro
thegl...@my-deja.com

Reini Urban

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Jun 26, 2000, 3:00:00 AM6/26/00
to
Marco Antoniotti wrote:
>rur...@sbox.tu-graz.ac.at (Reini Urban) writes:
>> Dave wrote:
>> >What's your editor of choice?
>> >notepad?...emacs?
>>
>> This guy got you, folks. It was an AutoLISP question :)
>>
>> dave,
>> comp.cad.autocad is the appropriate newsgroup.
>> see the faq entry about editors in my sig.
>
>I don't understand your answer. What is out there that is *not*
>editable by (X)Emacs or od? :)

because there exist only two Autolisp'ers who use (X)emacs to my
knowledge.
notepad is the most common editor for them, with lisppad on the high-end
side, for those who cannot afford visual lisp (formely known as vital
lisp). The latter two are nicely intergrated into AutoCAD, (X)emacs not
(yet).
ntemacs beats only notepad so far, but not the other specialized
AutoLISP or other more general purpose win32 editors which are in common
use.

Marco Antoniotti

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Jun 26, 2000, 3:00:00 AM6/26/00
to

Tom Breton <t...@world.std.com> writes:

> David Bakhash <ca...@alum.mit.edu> writes:
>
> > as I said from the start. it's mostly religious, and there's no clear
> > "best", since that's mostly an opinion.
> >
> > But your description of Emacs Lisp as some sort of bastardized language
> > is not an opinion I share. There's history there, and there are reasons
> > why it is the way it is. For an editor, it's a pretty powerful set of
> > extensions. Having written a couple of elisp programs, and seen how
> > much slower they are (and knowing _why_ they are to some extent) is not
> > such a great feeling. But Emacs Lisp and CL are similar in some
> > respects. I think that the main places where elisp is crippled is:
> >
> > 1) no package system
> > 2) dynamic scope everywhere
> > 3) reader, and reader-related functions, objects, etc.
>
> cl-read will do that. Unfortunately it could not be made part of the
> emacs distribution because nobody could find Guido Bosch, but it's out
> there.

I am not familiar with Guido Bosch's extension, bu I have been using
mine for quite some time (at the time it was also submitted to
gnu.emacs.sources)

==============================================================================
;;; -*- Mode: Emacs-Lisp -*-

;;; cl-read.el -- Some Common Lisp style READ functions for Emacs
;;; Lisp. (Written following the CL extension package style of
;;; suffixing Emacs Lisp names with a '*').

;;; Author: Marco Antoniotti <mar...@cs.nyu.edu>
;;; Version: 0.1
;;; Date: 19980529
;;; Keywords: extensions

;;; This file is not part of GNU Emacs.

;;; This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
;;; it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
;;; the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option)
;;; any later version.

;;; This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
;;; but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
;;; MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
;;; GNU General Public License for more details.

;;; You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
;;; along with GNU Emacs; see the file COPYING. If not, write to the
;;; Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330,
;;; Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.

;;; Commentary:

;;; These are extensions to Emacs Lisp that provide a degree of
;;; Common Lisp compatibility, beyond what is already built-in
;;; in Emacs Lisp.
;;
;;; This code was written by Marco Antoniotti, based on the CL
;;; extensions coming with GNU Emacs.
;;
;;; This package works with Emacs 19, Emacs 20, and Lucid Emacs 19.
;;
;;; Bug reports, comments, and suggestions are welcome!

;;; Code:

(require 'cl)

;;; Note the CL style DEFUN*.

(defun* read* (&optional (input-stream standard-input)
(eof-error-p t)
eof-value
recursivep)
"Reads a Emacs Lisp object from INPUT-STREAM.
READ* is a Common Lisp like extension to Emacs Lisp READ function.
The argument EOF-ERROR-P tells the function what to do in case of a
END-OF-FILE error is signalled by the underlying reader: if non-NIL
then the error is re-signalled, if NIL then the value of EOF-VALUE is
returned from the function.
RECURSIVEP is not used/usable in Emacs-Lisp. It is in the argument
list only for aesthetic/compatibility reasons."
(declare (ignore recursivep))
(condition-case eof-condition
(read input-stream)
(end-of-file (if (not eof-error-p)
eof-value
(signal 'end-of-file (cdr eof-condition))
))))

(defun* read-from-string* (input-string
&optional
(eof-error-p t)
eof-value
recursivep
&key
(start 0)
(end (length input-string))
)
"Reads a Emacs Lisp object from INPUT-STRING.
READ-FROM-STRING* is a Common Lisp like extension to Emacs Lisp READ
function. The argument EOF-ERROR-P tells the function what to do in
case of a END-OF-FILE error is signalled by the underlying reader: if
non-NIL then the error is re-signalled, if NIL then the value of
EOF-VALUE is returned from the function.

Keyword arguments :START and :END delimits the substring to scan for
Emacs Lisp objects.

RECURSIVEP is not used/usable in Emacs-Lisp. It is in the argument
list only for aesthetic/compatibility reasons.

The returned value is a cons: (OBJECT-READ . FINAL-STRING-INDEX)."
(declare (ignore recursivep))
(condition-case eof-condition
(read-from-string input-string start end)
(end-of-file (if (not eof-error-p)
eof-value
(signal 'end-of-file '("string ended.")))
;; We should probably define a new error.
)))

(provide 'cl-read)

;;; end of file -- cl-read.el --

==============================================================================

--
Marco Antoniotti ===========================================

David Bakhash

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Jun 26, 2000, 3:00:00 AM6/26/00
to
Marco Antoniotti <mar...@parades.rm.cnr.it> writes:

> > cl-read will do that. Unfortunately it could not be made part of the
> > emacs distribution because nobody could find Guido Bosch, but it's out
> > there.
>
> I am not familiar with Guido Bosch's extension, bu I have been using
> mine for quite some time (at the time it was also submitted to
> gnu.emacs.sources)
>
> ==============================================================================
> ;;; -*- Mode: Emacs-Lisp -*-
>
> ;;; cl-read.el -- Some Common Lisp style READ functions for Emacs

> ;;; [...]
> ;;; Code:
> [...]

This is very far from what cl-read.el does. As I recall, cl-read
provides extensions for defining reader macros, setting dispatch macro
characters, readtable support, etc. It also supports `#+' `#-' `#.' and
much more.

dave


David Bakhash

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Jun 26, 2000, 3:00:00 AM6/26/00
to
Erik Naggum <er...@naggum.no> writes:

> * The Glauber <thegl...@my-deja.com>
> | There also seems to be a Jihad going on betwen GNU Emacs and Xemacs.
>
> The willingness to describe things as "religious" is only evidence
> of the poster's lack of ability to perceive the underlying issues.

I think I was the first person to describe the editor thing as religion.
I was just afraid of starting a religious war, and wanted to present as
many facts about my particular opinion, and why I use XEmacs almost
exclusively. Like most Unix guys, I am fluent in vi, but for
programming, (X)Emacs is by far preferred (for me). What can start
getting in the way of better judgment of a good editor for CL
programming is that people (like me) use (X)Emacs for things like email,
usenet news, discussion, web browsing, directory editor, in additional
to all the stuff involved with editing and programming (and that's a lot
of stuff). When it becomes that much a part of your life, there's
almost no way to break away. (e.g. my XEmacs is my whole screen. Of
course, there's sometimes an IE or Netscape, but that's about it. Talk
about tunnel vision.)

I agree that it _should_ be a discussion based on facts and features.
But what makes it religious is that the people arguing one editor often
don't know much (if anything) about the one(s) they're arguing against,
and yet still are sure that they're "right".

When I first learned about XEmacs, I remember thinking "How can they
have made GNU Emacs better?" My mind was barely open enough to try it
out, and I resisted for months. What saved me was simple curiosity.

dave

(p.s. I hate to say `saved me', but it's actually how I feel. sorry.)

Marco Antoniotti

unread,
Jun 26, 2000, 3:00:00 AM6/26/00