Re: Perl embedding: trial balloon
Kyle Jones <kyle_jones(a)wonderworks.com> wrote:
John Tobey writes:
> Huh? I want Perl to chew on the text in my buffer, not draw widgets.
> Could you please elaborate.
I baffled why simple subprocesses aren't good enough.
shell-command-on-region.
The sequence `C-u M-| perl' is etched in my spinal cord, but sometimes
one wants Perl for more sophisticated jobs, and sometimes one is
deprived of a reasonable shell.
Sure, I suppose you could implement a major mode as a separate Perl
process, but who really wants to invent protocols for such things?
Not to mention ways to serialize and deserialize interesting data
structures.
As someone who was written scripts that crash Perl and scripty
that crash Emacs (SIGSEGV, SIGBUS), I'm not looking forward to
trying to debug a combination of the two. Call it what it is: FEAR.
Actually, I find it quite entertaining. :^) But seriously, if
ordinary Perl code or ordinary Lisp code is crashing its interpreter,
there is probably a simple low-level fix, once you run it through GDB
with all the bells and whistles on. I have done this intensively over
the 15 months of Perlmacs' existence, and I claim that it is pretty
solid, clean, and concise.
Of course, that doesn't mean we'll be ready to enable Perl support by
default for quite some time.