From: Seth Kurtzberg <seth@...>
Date: 2003-10-09T07:18:50+09:00
Subject: Re: Extension Language for a Text Editor

Well, for one thing, doing it in lisp would be reinventing the wheel, as 
emacs has been around for ages.

One main advantage that I see to ruby is that one could modify existing 
code and add new code much more easily if the modifier doesn't have a 
lisp background.  lisp code is horribly unreadable.

If you do want to use a functional language Haskell is a much better 
choice, and would in fact be interesting in this context.

Nikolai Weibull wrote:

>OK.  So I'm going to write a text editor for my masters' thesis.  The
>general idea of it is fixed but the extension language has not been
>settled on, yet.  I have thought of, in the footsteps of editors such as
>Emacs and its clones, using some version of LISP or Scheme, possibly
>GNU's Guile[1], or Jade's librep[2].  LISP-like languages have proved
>very successful in describing the way we edit text and is thus a sure
>bet.  It would, however, perhaps be of interest to use another language
>to try the waters.  In my previous editor (slackedit/sled[3]) I used
>Tcl[4] as an extension language, and it proved very easy to use, but I
>never got far enough to actually give it a good run.
>
>Anyway, what I'm getting at is:
>
>Do you figure Ruby to be a good extension language for a text editor?
>* What would be easier to do using Ruby?
>* LISP?
>* What language allows the most of the editing commands to be written in
>  the given language?
>* Is Ruby good enough for the task at the moment, performance wise?
>* Resource wise?  Does anyone have any statistics on this?
>
>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.
>
>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).
>
>thanks in advance,
>	nikolai
>
>[1] http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/
>[2] http://librep.sourceforge.net/
>[3] http://www.pcppopper.org/code/win/sled/
>[4] http://www.scriptics.com/
>
>--
>::: 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 :::
>main(){printf(&linux["\021%six\012\0"],(linux)["have"]+"fun"-97);}
>
>
>.
>
>  
>


-- 
Seth Kurtzberg
CTO
Scottsdale Research and Network Operations Center
ISEC.us
seth@isec.us