APL mode

[Rustom Mody]

Resending my last message in plain text.
Sorry for the inconvenience!
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Hello all!

As some of you may know Gnu Apl has been very recently released
http://www.gnu.org/software/apl/

I feel in the modern unicoded world, APL may be more usable than it
has ever been, so having a modern (unicode-based) Apl running on
Gnu/Linux systems is quite a big thing. [Well at least for some
old-fogeys :-) ]

I asked the author Juergen Sauermann if there was an emacs mode.
He asked 'Whats a mode? " :-) . He agreed that if I provided one he
would put it in.

Is anyone working on this??

For the time being Ive put together something minimal by
a. taking scheme.el, cmuscheme.el
b. search-replace-ing scheme by apl
c. Do the minimal hacking required to make it work
d. Throw out obviously unneeded parts (like DSSSL stuff)

Also looking at perl and ada modes for characters, fontlock etc.

Any preferable sources to study/copy from?
I tried to study C-mode(s) but it was too vast to make sense :-(

About syntax:
What does sexp mean for non-lisp languages like C etc?
(Needed for functions like forward-sexp)

About Font lock:
APL is notorious for being unreadable. This is related to having
almost no keywords and only weird characters.
Having a good coloration for different categories of characters will
help a long way.

Is there somewhere I can 8-10 different faces ready?
And how faces are used in programming modes?

Input methods:
Current input method supplied by Juergen is xmodmap based.
We need other more emacsy method(s). I'll write about that
subsequently, if I can get the above working :-)


Rusi

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