From: Hugh Sasse Staff Elec Eng <hgs@...>
Date: 2000-12-02T02:50:57+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:6707] Ruby and Emacs (was: Re: [...])

On Fri, 1 Dec 2000, Dave Thomas wrote:

> I think there is a more elegant solution using properties under
> Xemacs, but I'll leave that investigation to someone who knows their
> cars from their cdrs.

I had the feeling that Ruby inherited _some_ ideas from lisp.
(Not sure where that came from, actually, but still...)
So a couple of half-baked ideas/questions:

Would it be practical, or really difficult, to craft an
automatic (e)lisp to Ruby translator? (Perl had a2p, s2p...)

If that were possible, would there be benefits in converting
Emacs to use Ruby instead of (e)lisp?  I'm thinking of:
you'd get more readable code; it might be possible to 
integrate it tightly with other ruby code, and to C using
Ruby's API.  Could it be faster (after tuning)?  Could
the Ruby syntax mode be REALLY intelligent if you did it this
way?

I know there would be disadvantages: *Another* version of
Emacs, things that would be hard to translate efficiently,
person-hours spent re-inventing this wheel could be better
used to further the spread of Ruby, and so on.  

I have not got into Emacs yet (when I first tried it was
over a PAD, and <ctrl-P> gave me the PAD> prompt!) and I
haven't been able to make any headway in lisp either, so 
I fear this could be a stupid thing to write on both counts,
but I'm hoping not! :-)

So is there any merit at all in this "brain fizzle"?

	Hugh
	hgs@dmu.ac.uk