"Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull(a)sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> writes:
>>>>> "monkeyiq" == monkeyiq
<monkeyiq(a)dingoblue.net.au> writes:
monkeyiq> just in case the relavant people are unaware of swig,
Dunno about anybody else, but I'm aware of SWIG. Unfortunately, SWIG
is designed for projects which can accept the discipline imposed by
writing with SWIG as the target. Emacs is 25 or 30 years old, full of
cruft and idiosyncracy.
Well, from reading the previous URLs on future directions of XEmacs with
respect to scripting lang (lisp/scheme) it seemed that the preposed step
1 was to cleanup the cruft a little, at which point it may (possibly) be
feasable to use swig to wrap the C part and expose it to other languages.
monkeyiq> so that people who want to script emacs in python can,
monkeyiq> and people who want LISP can.
It doesn't really work that way. Yes, there's 22MB of C code in ./src
and ./lwlib, and only 13MB of Lisp in ./lisp. But much of the code in
../src is Lisp "hand-compiled" to C. Really, less than 1/3 of X?Emacs
is "real C" code, and much of that is "hardware" interfacing (care
and
feeding of windowing systems, etc). Much C code that implements
editing functionality is just wrappers around Lisp functions.
Admittedly one would get a very lispish API for other languages. but I
dont see that having C implement a lisp function being a real problem here
(maybe its just me), if a lisp function can call the C function, or a perl
sub can call a function that smells very lispish because it operates "like"
a lisp programmer would expect. ie. in this case the perl guy can still call
the function, and maybe somebody then wraps many of these lisp feeling functions
into an OO perl framework, to give a less lisp feel to the API.
Not to mention that much of the really advanced functionality is based
on hooks, AKA callbacks, and they must conform to the Lisp API.
This would really be the interesting part. If I can find a more generic
solution than what witme is using on this currently, then I might be
in a better position to talk of this. I have not fully beaten this to
death in witme at the moment, but I have ideas on the wing to play with.
So SWIG isn't much help at all.
You're welcome to think about it and try it out; there's plenty of
room in the repository for a branch if you get to actually coding.
But when it gets sticky, don't say we didn't warn you. :-)
Heh, I'll keep this in mind :) though I'd like to be a lot more sure
that my ideas work before forceing another branch of emacs on the
world.
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Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091
_________________ _________________ _________________ _________________
What are those straight lines for? "XEmacs rules."
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