On Thu, 19 Feb 2009, Helmut Eller wrote:
- Andras Simon [2009-02-19 14:01+0100] writes:
I'm not sure where (or how far) you want to take it, but this looks like very good news to me! Is it ready for alpha-testing?
If you want to use it, you have to fill in many missing parts.
I wish I could...
This was primarily a exercise to learn a bit of Ruby. The file implements only very little functionality. The only command that works is slime-eval-region. The debugger isn't a real debugger it just displays the backtrace (without local variables) from the exception object.
Certain commands, like slime-eval-last-expression, would need some elisp code which understands Ruby's syntax a bit better. Or perhaps it would be better to have different commands like eval-current-line because "the last expression" is not a very useful concept in a infix syntax.
Syntax-related stuff could perhaps be lifted from ruby-mode. Although I'm not sure how good that is; ruby-forward-sexp for example doesn't quite do what I think it should. (But it's possible that the problem lies with my expectations.)
I.e., are you ready for taking questions and bug reports from clueless users?
I can answer questions, but I don't have a good idea how a decent Slime-for-Ruby should look like. E.g. tab-completion for method-names seems to be hard(er) to implement in Ruby because most names are interpreted relative to some module/class while in Lisp most function-names are global symbols.
I wish I knew how to go about it. Maybe a combination of slime and jde (very fancy java mode for emacs) would be needed. (It's been a while, but I think it could do completion.) BTW it seems that ruby-mode can already do some symbol-completion based on ri:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.ruby/browse_thread/thread/50a36818c...
Of course it's not the real thing.
My impression was that Emacs's ruby-mode works quite well with irb in a comint buffer and hence, something like Slime is less necessary. I was also pleasantly surprised that Matz seems to be one of the authors of ruby-mode.
I'm afraid I'm spoiled by slime. ruby-mode is much better than nothing, but much less capable than ilisp was. But it's possible that I'm missing something.
Thanks! Andras