···@violet.csl.sri.com (Bob Riemenschneider) writes:
>
> In article <···············@crawdad.ICSI.Berkeley.EDU> Marco Antoniotti
> <·······@crawdad.icsi.berkeley.edu> writes:
>
> > This thread about in-core editors and so on strikes me as a little
> > "off". The ultimate structure editor for any Lisp (Elisp, Scheme or
> > Common Lisp) is Emacs. :)
>
> I'd agree that, overall, using Emacs is a win. But the Interlisp
> structure editor did have some advantages. For instance, every once in
> awhile, when you wound up in the debugger, it was nice to be able to do a
> little surgery on the control structures of a function that you were in
> and continue, rather than having to back up the stack to before the call
> or figure out what value the function should have returned. And maybe the
> fact that this style of editing encouraged you to look at programming as
> modifying an image to make it do what you want rather than writing source
> code -- e.g., you ended an Interlisp session by doing a SYSOUT,
> effectively saving the image, not by saving the source code to be reloaded
> later -- shouldn't be ignored. I think this encouraged a more
> incremental, hackeresque view of the development process.
>
My original posting was obviously semi-provocatory. However, either
you have a very tight "structure editor" for in-core editing or you
must use what you have (in this case Emacs.)
AFAIK there are no good structure editors (i.e. with the same
"quality level" of Emacs) for Lisp out there. Since we are not
working on Xerox machines or derived stuff anymore, it seems to me
that the whole thread is moot. It is as simple as that.
Let me know if there are Interlisp-like strucutre editors that I can
use for Common Lisp (possibly CMUCL under Solaris/FREEbsd) and I will
give them a try.
But in this time and space, discussing of structure editors as a
"distinguishing" characteristics is like discussussing of the "sex of
angels". There are many other things that are way more sorely needed
in Lisp environments that alternative ways to edit an image.
Finally, the post that RAR just made makes a very good point.
Structure editors encourage a very hackerish (in the "bad" sense of
the word) way of programming. Since I am a person that is still
ticked off by the limitations of DEFPACKAGE :) I would definitively
favor a "text editor" over a "structure" one, just beacause of this
side-effect on programming style.
Cheers
--
Marco Antoniotti - Resistente Umano
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...it is simplicity that is difficult to make.
...e` la semplicita` che e` difficile a farsi.
Bertholdt Brecht