From: Alder Green <alder.green@...>
Date: 2006-04-25T01:53:46+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby scripting support for Emacs

On 4/24/06, Bil Kleb <Bil.Kleb@nasa.gov> wrote:
> Alder Green wrote:
> > Hi
>
> Hello.
>
> > Is there a way to use Ruby as a scripting language for Emacs?
>
> Try EL4R: Emacs Lisp for Ruby,
>
>  http://www.rubyist.net/~rubikitch/computer/el4r/index.en.html
>
> Regards,
> --
> Bil
> http://fun3d.larc.nasa.gov
>
>

Thanks, Bil

EmacsRuby is truly what I was looking for. Unfortunately, it seems to
have some problems working on the Windows platform. Since the author
expressed interest in attempts to run EmacsRuby under Win32, I sent
him a detailed account of the problems I encountered. I'll attach it
here, maybe someone would benefit:

To: EmacsRuby's author
Subject: EmacsRuby on Windows

Hi there

You mentioned in EmacsRub's homepage that you don't have access to a
Windows machine. I have Windows XP Pro as my desktop workstation, so
I'll share my attempt to install EmacsRuby on Windows. Ruby version:
ruby 1.8.4 (2005-12-24) [i386-mswin32] (pretty much the current stable
standard)

1. Attempting to download and install EmacsRuby in the recommended way:

ruby -ropen-uri -e
'URI("http://www.rubyist.net/~rubikitch/archive/el4r-1.0.3.tar.gz").read.display'
> el4r-1.0.3.tar.gz

doesn't work. The resulting local file  el4r-1.0.3.tar.gz  is
corrupted for some reason (manual download through the browser worked,
however).

2. Windows machine don't normally have tar (I do), let along the tar +
gzip combination (even I don't :-(), so trying to expand through:

tar xzf el4r-1.0.3.tar.gz

doesn't work. Have you considered a gem or at least a Zip release?

3. Running setup.rb worked. However File.expand_path("~") didn't work
within the various files in bin. Strangely enough,
File.expand_path("~") worked fine in IRB, but trying
File.expand_path(s) where s contains the ~ character produced the
following exception trying to run the first of two setup-lines ("ruby
-S el4r-rctool -p"):

C:/ruby/bin/el4r-rctool:189: (eval):1:in `expand_path': couldn't find
HOME environment -- expanding `~/.el4r' (ArgumentError)
        from (eval):1

I solved this by replacing within el4r-rctool all "~" in paths to "/",
which is the directory Emacs uses as HOME. After that, the two setup
lines:

ruby -S el4r-rctool -p
ruby -S el4r-rctool -i

executed appearantly without exception.

But when I entered Emacs and ran el4r-boot, I got a message:

"el4r instance dead"

At that point, I tried running the tests:

ruby bin/el4r-runtest testing/test-el4r.rb --batch -l testlog
--emacs=[emacs binary name]

but again received the exception "couldn't find HOME environment".

At this point I gave up :(

Please let me know if there's anything I can do to help you stabilize
el4r for Windows, since I'm very interested in programming Emacs with
Ruby.

Regrads,
Alder