[Orgmode] [babel] common lisp / slime evaluation in org-mode

[Erik Iverson]

Hello,

I have started playing around with SLIME and was pleased to find there
was already some support in org-mode for evaluating Common LISP
blocks. The comments in ob-lisp.el makes it clear that it is not
complete support yet. It appears for example that you can only
evaluate one lisp form per code block. Here is an example.

* First, let's try in emacs lisp

The following works how I would expect. The value in the results block
is the value of the last expression in the code block.

#+begin_src emacs-lisp

(defvar test1 "test1 value")
(defvar test2 "test2 value")
test2

#+end_src

#+results:
: test2 value

* Now, let's try common lisp

First, we need to start up a SLIME session, with M-x slime. This
assumes you have SLIME set up correctly. I am using SBCL as my CL
environment in this example.

#+begin_src lisp :session

(defvar test1 "test1 value")
(defvar test2 "test2 value")
test2

#+end_src

#+results:
: TEST1

You see the result in the buffer is the value of the first form, and
if I go into the inferior-lisp buffer, test2 is not bound to any
value. If I evaluate the CL code block above without the :session
argument, I get an error in the *Org-Babel Error Output* buffer.

Looking at the code in ob-lisp.el, I think I see why this is
happening, but don't know enough about SLIME yet to make it work. It
seems that line that calls =eval-slime= would need to be changed to
=eval-slime-buffer= after dumping the code block into a temporary
buffer. However, that didn't quite work since that function
(=slime-eval-buffer=) doesn't appear to actually return the final
value.

So, I write this in case this is an easy fix for someone with more
knowledge of SLIME, and to confirm that this is indeed the current
behavior that others see. I will continue to investigate a solution.

Thanks,
--Erik