Re: Extension Language for a Text Editor

* Ryan Pavlik <[e-mail]> [Oct, 08 2003 22:30]:
> The thing with lisp, though, is that everyone has used lisp already,
> and while I love lisp, there wouldn't be much of a reason to switch
> from XEmacs and its twenty million extensions.
Yes, this is one of the downsides in a way.  You won't be able to get
people to switch very easily when everything is the same ;-)
> YES.  I've been wanting "erubs" (Editor for Ruby Scripts ;-) for
> awhile; something like emacs, but s/lisp/ruby.  Same design otherwise.
hehe, that won't be the name, but yeah, that's in a sense what I want.
Except s/Emacs/Vim/ ;-).
> Well, the main thing is that ruby has a lot of very convenient pattern
> and text matching functionality, and a boatload of extensions.  And
> it's a very easy language, so anyone can pick it up and start
> extending the editor, unlike emacs, where fewer brave the waters.
Well, no dependencies on Ruby extensions would be necesarry, but I
guess, since they exist, they could be used.
> For instance, I recently wrote a bit of code to align things:
>
> a = b            ___\         a   = b
> foo = bar           /         foo = bar
>
> This was a few simple lines of ruby.  Not counting comments, it's 44
> lines of lisp that don't quite work perfectly.
Could you provide the code?  I'd love to see the comparison.
> As much as I love lisp, I can't really think of things that would be
> easier to in any of the above scheme flavors that wouldn't be easier
> in ruby.
OK.  The way I see it, Ruby is OO-programming personified.  LISP is,
well, functional? programming personified.  Anyway, I have gotten the
feeling that it's generally easier to think in terms of functional, not
OO, when editing text.  I mean, what do tho OO constructs really add?
>
> > * What language allows the most of the editing commands to be written in
> >   the given language?
>
> Ruby certainly allows this.  It's extremely trivial to extend and use
> Ruby in C.  They go hand-in-hand.  Plus there are existing GUI
> packages you could interface to if you wanted to provide UI handling
> in ruby without a lot of work.
Ah, I think you misunderstood the question.  Or I'm misunderstanding the
answer ;-).  I want the C core to be as small as possible, leaving the
most possible flexibility using the extension language.  And I don't
generally see the need for GUI extensions and such.
> > * Is Ruby good enough for the task at the moment, performance wise?
> > * Resource wise?  Does anyone have any statistics on this?
>
> This is a decent benchmark:
>
>    http://www.bagley.org/~doug/shootout/craps.shtml
>
> Is ruby at the top of that list?  No.  (Note that most of the
> languages above it are compiled, including the bigloo scheme
> implementation).  But XEmacs elisp falls near the bottom, and I use
> that for editing tasks daily.  Tcl and Rep both fall below.
Thanks, great summary!
> So, I wouldn't worry about performance.  And, memory-wise, I can't
> really offer benchmarks, but I have a system managing tens of
> thousands of objects that doesn't present a problem.
OK.  Good.
> > I'm not talking about the ease of implementing a web browser in the
> > target language, rather the ease of structuring an extensible framework
> > in it.
> Then Ruby is ideal.  Extending and embedding it is extremely easy.
Yeah, this, I know.  My experiences from the Ruby-GNOME2 project have
been great.  Very easy to add extensions.  I haven't used the embedding
facilities yet, but I'm sure they're good.
> > Also, is there any way of redefining the // operator for constructing
> > regular expression objects?  I'm planning on implementing a new regex
> > syntax for the editor (to make searches/substitutions easier to
> > describe).
>
> No, but I would encourage you leave the existing regular expression
> format intact, as, while somewhat write-only, is familiar to most
> people who will be using your editor.  Redefining // would break a lot
> of extension code, and alienate a large part of your audience.
>
> However, that's not to say you can't make your own matching format.
> I'm not sure what you have in mind, but there are a number of ways to
> bend the syntax to integrate such things.
Yeah, but that's just the thing.  This is one of the real selling
points, if you will ;-).  Oh well, I guess one can always do some
	MyRegex.new(string)
but then you wind up with the string interpolation problems (\n and
friends). :-(
>
> > thanks in advance,
>
> If you write a ruby editor... thank _you_. ;-)
hehe, we'll see ;-)
>
> hth,
>
thanks for your long and quick response.  It's good to know that at
least someone is interested :-),
	nikolai

--
::: name: Nikolai Weibull    :: aliases: pcp / lone-star / aka :::
::: born: Chicago, IL USA    :: loc atm: Gothenburg, Sweden    :::
::: page: www.pcppopper.org  :: fun atm: gf,lps,ruby,lisp,war3 :::
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