Re: beginner el form

[Adam]

Thi, I think I agree. 

As an elisp novice, I'm dropping into it from time to time, and making
progress with the elisp manual and introduction. Am spending most of my
other time calling cmucl as a listener with c-x l and c-x c-e. The cmucl
documentation is good, so am having fun. 

The elisp and emacs learning curves are both steady, seems no way around
that but for further quiet clicking away and reading. Or probably getting
serious about a bigger but finite application. I know that I'm not getting
any younger, so whether crazyness or crankiness manifests itself
first . . . 

Meantime I'm happy with emacs and cmucl, and am starting to "get" elisp. So
thanks to all here on this rather civilized newsgroup. 


Joe Corneli wrote:

> I (independently) wrote something called scrat.el that does
> essentially what Thi's suggested code does, but just a little
> different. (Its useful, but a little revision is pending to make it
> more useful.)  Why blather about it?  To show you that this is a
> pretty "universal" approach.

Novices are a little uncertain when starting off. The initial "scratch
buffer" appears as a temporary workspace. Saving as .. only then implies
some work has started. The initial scratch buffer is not the traditional
Hello World, although it can be.   

The FSF "An Introduction to Introduction Programming in Emacs Lisp" by
Robert Chassell uses C-x C-e exclusively, and no C-j. 

> I don't have any "better suggestions" than tinkering with your code,
> but one additional suggestion is the trace mechanism, which can be a
> useful supplement to edebug.  I've recently found it helpful to trace
> all the functions in a buffer (see trace-all.el).  I guess this also
> implies the standard "break your functions up into smaller functions."

Between my new cmucl experience, and the modes and () error checking of
emacs, this novice is making some progress. So thank you for all comments. 

A.