Mastodawn

Simon Brooke Jul 7, 2024

> We're hardly ever typing function definitions into it so I rather think of it as your workbench.

This is because Common #Lisp is designed around text editing files in file store rather than structure editing actual Lisp structures in memory -- to the extent that it's pretty hard to retrofit a structure editor into Common Lisp.

I feel, having grown up in the days of structure editors, that this is an enormous own goal.

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Omar Antolín Jul 7, 2024

@simon_brooke @zyd @falken @jesus I think I missed that era of structure editors! All the editors I know use text and all of the attempts at structure editors I've read about seem to have failed to gain any traction. Which structure editors did you use?

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Simon Brooke Jul 7, 2024

@oantolin @zyd @falken @jesus
I *think* the editor in BBC #Lisp was just called 'edit'; the editor in Cambridge Lisp was invoked as 'fedit' when editing functions, and I *think* that was pretty much the lifted direct from Portable Standard Lisp. The structure editor in #InterlispD was invoked as DEdit (for 'display edit'). Interlisp had the structure editor well integrated with the package manager, and I roughly copied that into Portable Standard Lisp...

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Simon Brooke

@oantolin @zyd @falken @jesus Ah! Acornsoft (BBC) Lisp did not come with a built in editor, but the manual told you how to write your own, here:

https://www.journeyman.cc/~simon/tmp/LISP_on_the_BBC_Microcomputer.pdf#page=115

The Cambridge Lisp editor was very similar to (a bit more sophisticated than) this.

I absolutely loved these editors; they felt very natural to me. And of course they completely eliminate the problem of balancing brackets.

[Edit: corrected the URL, so that other people can read it. Whoops!]