On Dec 10, 2:15 pm, Simon Brooke <still...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> I note people seem mainly to be using Emacs as an editing/development
> environment for Clojure. But as people keep pointing out, Clojure is
> homoiconic; the canonical source of a function is not a stream of
> bytes read from a file, but is a structure in core.
>
> Now, in-core editing does raise some issues - there needs to be some
> means of associating the structure which is the canonical source of a
> function with the function itself, so that when the user invokes (edit
> froboz) (or (edit 'froboz), or whatever), the source structure for
> froboz is displayed in the editor. But in-core structure editors are
> extremely powerful and useful when editing homoiconic languages, so...
> is anyone working on an in-core editor for Clojure?
Do you mean structured editing combined with image based development?
I haven't really looked that closely at the old Interlisp documents
but I suppose the source code is managed the same way it is in most
Smalltalk systems but I have always been a bit puzzled about how that
works with Lisp.
In Smalltalk it is fairly straightforward since there is an obvious
mapping from classes and methods to source code. With lisp it is not
that simple as there is no limit to the syntactic forms that the user
might want to query and edit in different forms. For example, if I
have (define-foo my-foo ...) macro that is used to define some complex
function named my-foo what happens when I do (edit 'my-foo)? Do I get
the original define-foo form or the macroexpansion? What about when
define-foo does something more complex like defines a bunch of methods
and datastructures or binds my-foo to a closure? There needs to be
mechanism that associates evaluated forms with the name(s) of the
resulting object(s) and it probably couldn't, in general, be done
automatically.
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