Re: [Bug-apl] APL and text editors- some initial thoughts

[Elias Mårtenson]

Peter,

The Emacs mode is much more than a simple way of editing functions in an editor. The intention is to transform the standalone GNU APL interpreter into some kind of IDE in a similar way as SLIME does for Common Lisp. The Emacs mode backend provides similar functionality as the Swank backend for Common Lisp.

You can watch the video I posted yesterday to get an idea of how it integrates with Emacs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yP4A5CKITnM

As you might understand, there is a very tight level of integration there.

I would be very happy if someone would like to write a Vim frontend (for example) utilising the same communications protocol. Currently, however, there is only an implementation for Emacs.

Regards,

Elias

On 29 April 2014 00:14, Peter Teeson <address@hidden> wrote:

Hi Elias:

Firstly I am totally agnostic as to which text editor should be used.  

I don't even understand why there should be an Emacs mode. 

But since you said it's actually generic maybe we can change it's name 

to more clearly reflect its generic nature? External Editor Mode? Just a fleeting thought.

[APL2 had an )Editor command]

There does need to be state switching from (immediate) execution to editing to etc…

The IBM APL2 Language Reference has a brief discussion about this in Ch 9.

As I said I need to get up to speed on the existing mechanism.

Right now all that I have found is the existing source "Emacs" code.

Rather than read through a multitude of postings of something that is 

already in existence is there a document that I can read if I wished to interface 

e.g. TextWrangler telling me how would I go about it? 

(I don't intend to do that - just try to understand what we have now as an interface)

respect

Peter