Hi,

I was at a conference last week, and spent the boring bits hacking; one of the things I've got at least partially done is a swank implementation for R (the statistical array-based language). Bits that work include: * REPL * sldb + backtrace + display of locals + invoking restarts by number + throw to toplevel (basically nothing else works)

R is an interesting language and environment: it's almost a lisp -- almost a CL in some respects. It has generic functions, multimethods and multiple dispatch; it has conditions, handlers and restarts; it has eval and read ("parse"). In fact it has almost everything other than a compiler (but on the other hand, it basically has fexprs...).

Since I plan to use R for Real Work in future, and since the default R environment under emacs is OK but nothing to write home about (and the debugger is actively painful), I can see myself developing and maintaining this swank implementation for a while. Given this, would there be any objections to keeping it under contrib/ within slime?

(I will likely also be asking a similar question of the R project, as to whether keeping development there makes any sense. I understand that there's a certain amount of overlap between R types and Lispers -- there was even a proof-of-concept implementation of an R-to-CL compiler in 2006)

Cheers,

Christophe