command_editor and generating completions

[John Swensen]

I just found out about an add-on to GtkSourceView that does  
autocompletion. So, I have been looking into how Octave uses GNU  
readline to do completion from the command line.  It looks like there  
are a lot of utility functions already there to make my life easier,  
but have a couple of questions about how the  
command_editor::generate_*_completions() functions work.  I'm assuming  
that as with everything else, this interaction with readline and the  
list of function defined in Octave is *not* threadsafe?  My only  
problem is that this autocompletion is for the editor and it would  
stink if auto-completion wasn't available while Octave is currently  
executing.  I often start a script running, then go off and edit some  
other file while it is running. Since my threadsafe workaround so far  
has been to only interact with the internals of Octave during the  
readline idle event loop, I can't use this while a function/script is  
executing.

So, my question is whether there is a way to get a snapshot of  
whatever readline is storing so that I can reference this copy while  
the Octave interpreter is running?  What are the implications of  
calling GNU readline functions for finding possible completions while  
in the middle of executing a script?

John Swensen