Steve Morin <steve.morin@gmail.com> writes:
How to interact with a running lisp instance? I have been trying to figure this out. I know this is being done with slime. Does any one have any good pointer on this. I am thinking of writing a web application and would like to be able to update it on the fly for updates and bug fixes.
There are a lot of different ways. I use GNU screen <http://www.gnu.org/software/screen/> to detach/reattach from interactive sessions running Emacs and slime attached to the Lisp webserver running http://wigflip.com/. There's nothing magical about slime, though, or even really about the built-in repl of your implementation. Any way you can get data to the system can be used to create objects you can evaluate with EVAL. For example, you could have a HTTP handler that accepts POST requests and takes a parameter as Lisp code to read with e.g. READ-FROM-STRING, evaluate with EVAL and return the result with e.g. PRINT-TO-STRING. You wouldn't do that without thinking about the safety implications, of course... Zach