Re: Byte-compiler warnings

["Pascal J. Bourguignon" <pjb@informatimago.com>]

Marcin Borkowski <mbork@mbork.pl> writes:

> Are there other tools that assist in writing good Elisp code?  I know
> about checkdoc, is there anything else?

Once upon a time, there was a lot of such tools to help writing lisp
code, including code pattern matcher, expert systems, AI user models,
etc.

Unfortunately they were developped before a common lisp was designed
(namely, ANSI Common Lisp), and before it was customary to publish
source code in git repositories (even cvs didn't exist yet).  Therefore
you only find echoes of them in scientific papers, and rarely find
sources.  But even if you found sources, they often couldn't be used
both for licensing reasons and for technical reasons.

So no, we don't abound in such tools, be it for Common Lisp or for emacs
lisp.  There's a CL lint around, perhaps it could be adapted for emacs
lisp.


In any case, the point of lisp is that it is easy to write such tools,
because the syntax of lisp code is a subset of the syntax of lisp data,
and therefore you can read lisp code as lisp data.  On the other hand,
people edit text files as sources, and may want to preserve things that
are not in the sexp data of their sources, like comments, newlines,
spacing, and exact textual form of lisp objects that have several
representations.  This complicates the processing of lisp code, since
you have to actually process the text file.  And you may want to produce
advices about the formatting and commenting of those text files too
anyways. 

But this is not something that emacs cannot do easily.

So go ahead, read some old papers for inspiration, and write some nice
emacs lisp programmer assistant tool!





http://www.ai.univ-paris8.fr/~hw/mespubs.html
http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/interlisp

-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__                 http://www.informatimago.com/
“The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a
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