Re: handling parenthesis and quotes

[Adam]

Harald Hanche-Olsen wrote:

> + Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>:
> 
> |> From: Harald Hanche-Olsen <hanche@math.ntnu.no>
> |> Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2007 08:24:51 +0100
> |> |
> |> | (shell "grep -i \"\(define \" ~/mydir/myfile?.lisp")
> |> 
> |> Much easier to use the single quote for the shell command.
> |
> | But double quotes are more portable, as the Windows shells support
> | them, but don't support '...' quoting.
> 
> Oh.  I didn't know that.  But single quotes are more portable, as es
> and rc both support them, but not "...".
> 
> Er, never mind.
> 
> Oh, but I am confused now, because shell doesn't even take a command
> as an argument.  Did the OP mean shell-command?  And *that* isn't
> really portable either, if you wish to obsess about it, because (a) by
> default it uses the user's login shell, and (b) as you pointed out,
> different OSes have different kinds of shells anyhow.
> 
> In summary, if you wish to use shell-command portably on unix you need
> to wrap (let ((explicit-shell-file-name "/bin/sh")) ...) around it.
> 
> (Disclaimer:  I use a CVS emacs, so that variable may not be available
> on older emacsen for all I know.)

Thanks for your interest.  And the Windows or more 
general non-portable case is interesting. 

No - I just wanted a grepped list to pop up 
in my Emacs Slime *inferior-lisp* buffer, my 
user login shell works fine for this. 

A related newbie question might be, is this the 
usual approach for 'incremental programming' by 
Lisp users ?  That is; write a function, 
then append that function to a file of work 
with append-to-file ?  

This creates a file of functions that need 
to be listed from time to time. The grep thing 
works well for now. 

Perhaps that file will become a package for 
slime-set-package  slime-profile-package 
or preferably something more Emacs native. 

Am I on track with my understanding of this 
so far as 'incremental programming'?