Stephen Compall s11@member.fsf.org writes:
On Sun, 2006-03-05 at 10:06 -0800, Peter Seibel wrote:
a console app. But why the need to use inferior-lisp--SLIME communicates the port via a temp file, right. Is there some other communication that happens via the *inferior-lisp* channel?
Yes -- SLIME uses the inferior-lisp pty to send a form containing (load "path/to/swank-loader.lisp").
So, don't most (all?) Lisp's have some way to accept the name of a file to load as a command line argument? I understand that in the early days it was good to just use the *inferior-lisp* machinary because it was there and, when SLIME was in early development, it gave you a way to talk to Lisp when all else failed. Maybe the time has come to break free of the *inferior-lisp* legacy? Assuming I figure out a clean way to have SLIME pass the file-to-load-on-startup info to the spawned Lisp, is there anything else that would be lost by abandoning *inferior-lisp*?
I ask because it would be nice for me, as maintainer of Lispbox, if SLIME worked the same on all the OS/implementation combos--at the moment, the Allegro on Windows has to be handled different. It's also a bit irksome that the Windows workarounds folks suggest require hard-wiring the port.
-Peter