Re: Perl embedding: trial balloon

John Tobey <jtobey(a)channel1.com&gt; writes: I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, adding the feature for the users who want it has always been a policy in XEmacs, as opposed to FSF Emacs. But on the other hand, I don't really see a use for Perlmacs in the XEmacs core. XEmacs is based on Lisp, and it won't go away. Teaching people to utilize the Lisp interpreter they have is a worthy goal which I feel is threatened by allowing Perl to be used instead. Perl is popular. Perl is hype. People who have never heard of Emacs Lisp but know Perl, will want to use the new capabilities, and then we'll be stuck with supporting Perl. I don't like that prospect. I'll quit rambling and continue with the technical part. Ability to dynamically create new lreacord types would be a good thing regardless of Perlmacs. It's needed for instance to support DEFSTRUCT properly, as well as for Bill's proposed Corba stuff. [...] Implementing it like that would be a bad idea, I think. If we are to do it, we should add a notion of "function" to XEmacs. The "function" types are primitive types for which `functionp' evaluates to t. Examples of function types are the current #<compiled-function> and #<subr>. Other candidates are a future #<interpreted-function>, #<perl-function>, etc. A #<perl-function> would of course know which Perl object it refers to, and would invoke its appropriate call method, doing any magic that needs doing. What do you mean?