Help on Slime

Help on Slime

[Lorenzo Isella]

Dear All,
I am completely new to LISP (I want to learn it out of curiosity and 
maybe one day it will be useful to me) and surely not very experienced 
about using emacs.
I am running Debian testing on my box and installed both emacs and slime 
from Debian repositories.
I am a bit puzzled: if I create a file test.lisp with the trivial content:

(+ 1 2)

and then I load it then both the lisp mode and slime mode are 
automatically enabled.
However, if I try positioning the cursor and using  C-x C-e I get the 
message

Not connected.

If I disable the  slime (M-x slime-mode), then C-x C-e returns the 
obvious value 3.
What am I doing wrong? What I am seeing does not look much like the 
video at:

http://www.unixuser.org/~euske/vnc2swf/slime.html

In case it matters, I can post the .emacs file I am using.
Many thanks

Lorenzo

Re: Help on Slime

[Niels Giesen]

Lorenzo Isella <lorenzo.isella@gmail.com> writes:

> Dear All,
> I am completely new to LISP (I want to learn it out of curiosity and maybe one
> day it will be useful to me) and surely not very experienced about using emacs.
> I am running Debian testing on my box and installed both emacs and slime from
> Debian repositories.

Welcome to this little known part of the world!

> I am a bit puzzled: if I create a file test.lisp with the trivial content:
>
> (+ 1 2)
>
> and then I load it then both the lisp mode and slime mode are automatically
> enabled.
> However, if I try positioning the cursor and using  C-x C-e I get the message
>
> Not connected.

To run slime type M-x slime RET. Note that you might have to set
`inferior-lisp-program' if slime cannot the lisp set in there. For instance, my
setting is:

(setq inferior-lisp-program "sbcl --noinform")

... but I do not know what dependency slime declares under Debian, if any. Might
be sbcl, cmucl or even clisp.

>
> If I disable the  slime (M-x slime-mode), then C-x C-e returns the obvious value
> 3.

This is the Emacs lisp interpreter evaluating the expression. To know what
command a keychord invokes, prepend it with C-h k. In your example, looking at
the output of C-h k C-x C-e in both modes would have revealed that two distinct
commands are being invoked.

On a trivial level as this, CL and emacs lisp can understand each other
perfectly. Emacs lisp (or elisp) is the 'extension language' of Emacs and quite
similar to Common Lisp until it comes to bindings, reader macros and so
forth. It has its own REPL at M-x ielm RET in case you are interested in hacking
Elisp.

> What am I doing wrong? What I am seeing does not look much like the video at:
>
> http://www.unixuser.org/~euske/vnc2swf/slime.html
>
> In case it matters, I can post the .emacs file I am using.
> Many thanks
>
> Lorenzo
>
>
>
Enjoy exploring LISP/Emacs,

niels.
-- 
http://niels.kicks-ass.org

Re: Help on Slime

[Andrea Vettorello]

On Mon, Mar 24, 2008 at 1:04 AM, Lorenzo Isella
<lorenzo.isella@gmail.com> wrote:

[...]

>  I am a bit puzzled: if I create a file test.lisp with the trivial content:
>
>  (+ 1 2)
>
>  and then I load it then both the lisp mode and slime mode are
>  automatically enabled.
>  However, if I try positioning the cursor and using  C-x C-e I get the
>  message
>
>  Not connected.
>
>  If I disable the  slime (M-x slime-mode), then C-x C-e returns the
>  obvious value 3.

I'm confident that's the Emacs internal Lisp interpreter.

>  What am I doing wrong? What I am seeing does not look much like the
>  video at:

You should start the SLIME REPL with "M-x slime" (and you need to
install one of the supported Lisp environments, according to the
package description SBCL, CMUCL, OpenMCL and some versions of CLISP
and Lispworks).

If you are interested to know more, a good introductory book is Peter Seibel's
"Practical Common Lisp": http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/


-- 
Andrea

Re: Help on Slime

[Thierry Volpiatto]

Lorenzo Isella <lorenzo.isella@gmail.com> writes:

> Dear All,
> I am completely new to LISP (I want to learn it out of curiosity and
> maybe one day it will be useful to me) and surely not very experienced
> about using emacs.
> I am running Debian testing on my box and installed both emacs and
> slime from Debian repositories.
> I am a bit puzzled: if I create a file test.lisp with the trivial content:
>
> (+ 1 2)
>
> and then I load it then both the lisp mode and slime mode are
> automatically enabled.
> However, if I try positioning the cursor and using  C-x C-e I get the
> message
>
> Not connected.
>
> If I disable the  slime (M-x slime-mode), then C-x C-e returns the
> obvious value 3.
> What am I doing wrong? What I am seeing does not look much like the
> video at:
>
> http://www.unixuser.org/~euske/vnc2swf/slime.html
>
> In case it matters, I can post the .emacs file I am using.
> Many thanks
>
> Lorenzo
>
>
>

First you have to start slime with M-x slime RET.
Then you can do on your file M-x slime-eval-buffer RET.
Or M-x slime-eval-last-expression RET (with-point at the end of sexp)
(C-x C-e)
You will have the result in mini-buffer.

-- 
A + Thierry
Pub key: http://pgp.mit.edu