ELisp as a generic COM Client?

ELisp as a generic COM Client?

[Siegfried Heintze]

Has anyone enhanced ELisp to make it a generic COM client? Perl has this
feature and elisp seems like a good candidate?

Re: ELisp as a generic COM Client?

[Kevin Rodgers]

Siegfried Heintze wrote:

> Has anyone enhanced ELisp to make it a generic COM client? Perl has this
> feature and elisp seems like a good candidate?


Really?  From http://grc.com/dcom/


	The strange history of DCOM
	
	Many years ago, Microsoft began modularizing Windows and their
	Windows applications by breaking them into functional components
	with well-defined, "version safe" interfaces. The idea was to
	allow pieces of Windows and applications to inter-operate.
	
	The name first given to this effort was "OLE", which stood for
	Object Linking and Embedding. OLE suffered nearly terminal
	birthing pains and developed a reputation for being a bad
	idea. Undaunted, Microsoft renamed it COM for "Component Object
	Model". This was still the same old OLE, but Microsoft appeared
	to hope no one would notice. COM fared somewhat better, but it
	wasn't until Microsoft gave it the sexy name "ActiveX", and
	built it into virtually everything, that developers finally gave
	up trying not to use it.


-- 
Kevin Rodgers

Re: ELisp as a generic COM Client?

[Jason Rumney]

"Siegfried Heintze" <siegfried@heintze.com> writes:

> Has anyone enhanced ELisp to make it a generic COM client? Perl has this
> feature and elisp seems like a good candidate?

You can do what you like with your own copy of Emacs, but I don't
think linking with most COM obects would be compatible with the GPL.

Re: ELisp as a generic COM Client?

[Peter Lee]

>>>> Jason Rumney writes:

    Jason> You can do what you like with your own copy of Emacs, but I
    Jason> don't think linking with most COM obects would be
    Jason> compatible with the GPL.

Why not?  You don't link with COM objects, but even if you did, I'm
not sure why it would be against the GPL.

As to the topic, a while back I wanted to be able to instantiate and
call into a COM object from Emacs and ended up creating a plugin based
on Steve Kemp's work:

http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/emacs/DynamicallyExtendingEmacs 

Within the plugin I did what I wanted, which was basically the
automation of msdn for context sensitive help.

Re: ELisp as a generic COM Client?

[Kai Grossjohann]

One approach for this is to write a program that speaks a simple ascii
protocol on stdin/stdout, then have Emacs talk to that program.

Emacs has good support for speaking simple ascii protocols (and also
not so simple ascii protocols) in such a way.

WDYT?