Re: how to invoke the emacs interface for guile 1.7

[Neil Jerram]

Stephen Compall wrote:

> Neil Jerram <address@hidden> writes:
>
>
> > The way that GDS differs from run-guile.el, cmuscheme.el and the
> > like, is that you use it when working on a Scheme file - like C-x
> > C-e for Elisp - rather than by writing expressions in sequence in a
> > special shell-like window.
>
>
> What's your scheme mode?  In mine, which is just scheme.el and
> cmuscheme.el as distributed with Emacs, when I `run-scheme', these
> bindings are replaced with Scheme versions.  For example, "C-x C-e
> runs the command scheme-send-last-sexp, which is an interactive
> compiled Lisp function in `cmuscheme'."

GDS started as an extension of cmuscheme.el, but moved away from that as 
I tried to take more things into account, the two main things being:

- how do you interact with and debug a Guile application that doesn't 
have a command line (such as Gnucash), or which has a command line that 
doesn't speak Scheme?

- in parsing Guile's output so as to identify errors, backtraces, help, 
completion information and so on, how can we do better than either 
applying imperfect heuristics or adding control characters to Guile's 
output (a la ice-9/emacs.scm)?

GDS's answer is that you don't use stdin/stdout at all, but instead 
communicate with the application through a socket.  The ability and 
interface to evaluate code, do completions and ask for help from a 
Scheme buffer ends up being very similar to cmuscheme.el, but the 
implementation is quite different and IMO a more robust base for an 
eventual full function Guile IDE.


> However, this doesn't display the result in the minibuffer, if that is
> what gds does.

FWIW, GDS displays evaluation results and help (and backtrace, when 
debugging) in a separate "Guile Interaction" window that pops up when 
needed.

Regards,
     Neil