--- Daniel Barlow dan@telent.net wrote:
Bill Clementson bill_clementson@yahoo.com writes:
I found this comment curious as I thought that you used only a TCP socket to communicate between
emacs
and cl. I had a look at the source and you do
require
inferior lisp mode (ILM) and comint mode. What is
the
rationale for using both inferior lisp mode and a
TCP
socket? Is your intention to entirely replace ILM
with
socket communication or will you continue to use
ILM
for some things and sockets for others?
"Require" may be a bit of a strong word: it is possible to run SLIME with only the TCP connection (e.g. to a lisp on another machine) but you need to (swank:create-swank-server) on the CL by hand before running slime-connect.
That said, yes, if you run the default M-x slime it does use inferior-lisp to start up a lisp implementation. I think the plan is to make inferior-lisp largely unnecessary, but in the meantime for purposes of hacking slime itself it's damned handy to have an alternate route into Lisp when things get wedged.
(There's also the problem that although we can redirect all 'normal' lisp output, we don't currently trap anything in the lisp that bypasses the streams layer (e.g. foreign code printing to file descriptors) so that winds up in *inferior-lisp* as well. I'm sure we can solve this some other way, but thus far we haven't)
Thanks for the clarification. Incidentally, what was the rationale for using inferior lisp mode instead of ilisp to "boot-strap" development? ILISP has some of the same "negatives" as ILM (since both were built on comint mode) however it has a lot more functionality than ILM. It seems like (at least to me) it would have made more sense creating SLIME extensions on top of ILISP rather than ILM since there is so much more functionality in ILISP than there is in ILM. Even if the eventual goal is to replace all the functionality that is provided by ILM/ILISP, ILISP would provide more "short-term" benefits for the SLIME CL developer than ILM would.
- Bill
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