Helmut Eller heller@common-lisp.net writes:
- Peter Seibel [2006-03-05 22:58+0100] writes:
So, don't most (all?) Lisp's have some way to accept the name of a file to load as a command line argument?
Yes, but the details vary a lot. Also some people use shell scripts instead of the actual Lisp executable which complicates the issue.
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*?
It shouldn't be hard to offer both options to load and start swank: the traditional way which sends "(load swank)" to the inferior listener and a way to load swank via command line args.
Abandoning the *inferior-lisp* buffer is a somewhat different question and doesn't dependent very much on how we load swank. We could probably redirect the output that is currently sent to the *inferior-lisp* buffer to the *slime-repl* buffer. Redirecting input would be more difficult. It's a bigger step than changing the way how swank is started.
Yup. I was just wondering--if there were any uses of *inferior-lisp* that I was unaware of. Sounds like no. Which doesn't mean it's a good idea to get rid of it--just that it's not any worse than I already knew. Thanks. Just ruminating at this point anyway.
-Peter