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)
-dan