From: "Gray, Jeff" <jeff.gray@...>
Date: 2002-07-02T08:28:31+09:00
Subject: RE: Gvim interface to the ruby debugger?

Since this thread made the Ruby Weekly News wrap-up, I feel obliged to 
follow-up...  :^)

> > Can you talk to an open pair of pipes from Vim?  I didn't think you
> > could keep a live connection to another process in Vim in this way,
> > hence my convoluted socket-based architecture.
> 
> No, named pipes (a/k/a fifo). To run a debugger command (perhaps 
> step):

Ahh, *those* named pipes.  ;^)  So I did a little more digging, plugging
a few holes in my own knowledge of nitty-gritty I/O in the process.  Best
I can see, named pipes would limit the solution to Unix-esque platforms.  
'mkfifo' under my Cygwin installation returns a "Function not implemented"
error -- I take this to mean that it's simply not supported in Windows. 

> The catch is that you can't do "normal" file operations in VimL. You 
> can read a whole file, of course, and you can write or read to pipes 
> or files.

I did find a Gvim gdb interface on vim.sourceforge.net; it builds the 
fifo rd/wr operations into a C lib which is called from Vim.  Again,
I would like to keep the solution entirely in Ruby/VimL source.  See
http://vim.sourceforge.net/scripts/script.php?script_id=168.

  - jeff