In article b61efa90512220217s64926446le177758ad5d59966@mail.gmail.com, Thomas F. Burdick wrote:
Just making a guess here, I don't think that Derek wants a REPL at all -- probably something more like an elisp scratch buffer or a Smalltalk transcript.
Both REPLs and scratch buffers (or file buffers) are useful for different reasons.
REPLs give a structure to the buffer because you can only add input at the end. They also make evaluation easy (just press return). Scratch buffers are flexible but totally unstructured -- you can edit anything at any time. In scratch buffers, Emacs's evaluate-last-sexp, or Smalltalk's Esc (to select what was last typed) followed by the key to evaluate the selection, give you a little bit of structure, but not the same as in a REPL.
My big goal is to find the right concept of structure -- e.g., ordinary text or LISP expressions or expression/result pairs or many others -- for the task at hand. I then want to design a set of uniform commands to navigate and edit according to the current definition of structure.
And changing the appearance of buffers shows or hides certain kinds of structure. With no prompt, the REPL looks more like a bunch of LISP expressions, but still colored to show input vs. output.
with files. My current slime-scratch doesn't always behave correctly, but if there's interest, I can clear it with my manager and post it as a starting point.
Please do, it sounds generally useful. When does it not behave correctly?
-- Derek