I remember when I started programming in lisp I wanted to have the very same feature, but (fortunately) I didn't take the time to ask or to implement it. Now that I got used to lisp and SLIME I think it's rather confusing than convenient and I believe now I can perfectly understand why I wanted to have that and why I was wrong. It was of course related to my background and to the languages that I already knew.
Still I think both ways could be supported by SLIME (defaulting to the current behavior of course) and some people may find this degree of freedom useful. But I guess it will not be implemented by any advanced lisper clearly because they will not find it useful. On the other hand I personally don't see anything bad in applying a patch that optionally implements this behavior correctly.
levy
On 25 Aug 2006 03:46:36 +0200, Andras Simon andras@renyi.hu wrote:
Marco Antoniotti marcoxa@cs.nyu.edu writes:
Hi
I would like to suggest a feature for SLIME taken from Lispworks.
In LW I can type
prompt> first '(1 2 3) 3
prompt> member 42 '((3 2 3) (1 42 33) (42 11 22)) :key #'second ((1 42 33) (42 11 22))
I.e. a line gets parenthesized if it is not already an expression (of course there are cases where things get hairy, but in general I find it useful).
Is it typing or reading those outer parens that bothers you? If the former, then slime printing a pair of parens after the prompt with the point on the closing one, and temporarily making, say Space, delete the parens, would seem like a better idea to me.
This may even make it more appealing to people who dislike enclosing parentheses.
Who are those people? :)
Andras
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