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From: simon@rheged.dircon.co.uk (Simon Brooke)
Subject: Lament for the departed (was Re: history mechanism (kbd))
In-Reply-To: lgm@polaris.ih.att.com's message of Sun, 25 Sep 1994 16:42:05 GMT
Message-ID: <Cwr2Dy.5o8@rheged.dircon.co.uk>
Organization: none. Disorganization: total.
References: <35vc52$262k@yuma.ACNS.ColoState.EDU> <35vet1$52j@tools.near.net> <LGM.94Sep25114205@polaris.ih.att.com>
Date: Mon, 26 Sep 1994 18:37:09 GMT
Lines: 46

In article <LGM.94Sep25114205@polaris.ih.att.com> lgm@polaris.ih.att.com (Lawrence G. Mayka) writes:

      >Is there some form of a history mechanism for the different 
      >implementations of Common Lisp?  I'm currently using AKCL but will
      >be using Allegro in the near future as well - so I'm interested 
      >in this capability for both.

      Except for Lisp Machines, I don't know of any Lisp systems that have a
      built-in, Emacs- or vi-style history mechanism.  In general, Lisp vendors
      have been implementing this by running Lisp from Emacs buffers and
      providing Emacs enhancements to interface with the Lisp process.

Alas, poor InterLISP, I knew it well... InterLISP-D (of course) had a
history (it had a long history, but there's no need to go into
that...). There was a little window which sat on the screen, whose
icon represented a scroll. When opened, it showed you the last n
commands (you could set a global which controlled how long the history
list was. As I recall it defaulted to 100). You could redo any command
simply by clicking on it, and I'm fairly sure I remember that you
could copy one onto the command line by clicking with a different
button. You could also type 'redo', optionally with a numeric argument
(for how many commands ago you wanted to repeat) in the executive.

Of course this was beautifully integrated into the unspeakably
wonderful Do-What-I-Mean system (DWIM), so that after DWIM had
automatically corrected all your syntax errors, spelling mistakes,
failures to parenthesize, etc, it put the corrected version onto the
history.

Ochone! Ochone! InterLISP no longer applies. Its interpreter crumbles
in decay. Its pointers are blunted and its stacks cast down; its
splendid arrays are all hashed. No longer will it uninterruptably do;
its idleBouncingBox lies idle indeed, and will bounce no more. The
garbage collector has scavenged it; its bits are all sliced. Thus pass
the glories of this world, and thus does the final evaluator return:
NIL.




-- 
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