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Re: jump between if-fi


From: Alan Mackenzie
Subject: Re: jump between if-fi
Date: Tue, 1 Jan 2008 14:18:27 +0000
User-agent: Mutt/1.5.9i

Hi again, and Happy New Year, Reader!

On Mon, Dec 31, 2007 at 08:29:28PM -0600, reader@newsguy.com wrote:
> Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> writes:

> > This is a moderately difficult exercise in Elisp programming.  I
> > would suggest something like this:

> He-he... whats moderate for you appears to be clear over the top for me.

Don't underestimate yourself.  After all, you've mastered shell script.

> [...] snipped a very nice outline of how to go at it.


> > When you've got it working, please submit it to Emacs for inclusion
> > in Emacs 23!  Best of luck!

> Yes that would be very nice but is also very unlikely.  My skill level
> would have to be improved several hundred percentage points in a pretty
> short while.

Indeed.  Where's the problem with that?  The Emacs documentation
(including that for Emac Lisp) is sensationally good, and there's as much
help as you need on the net.  For functionality this useful, I'd happily
help you by personal email, even several times a week.

This is an ideal problem for getting into heavy elisping - it goes to the
core of Emacs, with hooks, text-properties/overlays, textual analysis
with regular expressions - yet it is tightly enough defined that you
won't just drift into an endless maze of discouraging vagueness and
complexity.  After implementing this, you would be welcomed with open
arms by the core Emacs team.

So, how long would all this take?  Several weeks, assuming ~15-30 hours
hacking time per week.

> I guess not too many emacs developers really do much shell scripting.
> Probably using a lot more high level scripting languages (perl, lisp,
> python and etc).  I run into portability problems more with shell
> scripts since something like perl is the same everywhere.

I would think most Emacsers write shell scripts reasonably fluently.
Lisp isn't really suited for the job, and p{erl,ython} seem over
complicated.  In my humble opinion, of course.  ;-)

> My perl is coming along well enough to use it for all scripting but I
> still have many older shell scripts I'd hate to have to convert.

So, why convert them?

[ .... ]

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany)




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