Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!rutgers!orstcs!tgd
From: tgd@orstcs.CS.ORST.EDU (Tom Dietterich)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Structure editors in common lisp
Message-ID: <1487@orstcs.CS.ORST.EDU>
Date: 12 Dec 87 22:53:09 GMT
Organization: Oregon State University - CS - Corvallis Oregon
Lines: 22
Posting-Front-End: GNU Emacs 18.47.1 of Sat Jun 27 1987 on orstcs.CS.ORST.EDU (berkeley-unix)


I too love Sedit in the Xerox lisp environment.  However, there is a
bad interaction between structure editors and packages.  Every symbol
typed to a structure editor is interned in the current package.  This
is generally too soon in my experience.  I would like to type in a
function and then decide which package to put it in.  With a 
text-editor development environment, you can do this sort of thing,
because you haven't committeed yet.  But in a structure editor, you
must be committed immediately.  The only way to fix it in the Xerox
environment is to write out your file in its package (so that no
prefixes get written) and then load it into a different package (using
a special keyword option on LOAD).  This is a pain and rarely works
right for me.

Maybe the structure editor could be changed so that it could "move"
all of the symbols in my function to a different package with one
command.  I haven't thought too carefully about this, but my
experience with the package system is that everything is trickier than
it looks.  Maybe this just indicates that the real problem is with the
package system...

--Tom Dietterich
tgd@cs.orst.edu