Re: Help on Slime

[Niels Giesen]

Lorenzo Isella <lorenzo.isella@gmail.com> writes:

> Dear All,
> I am completely new to LISP (I want to learn it out of curiosity and maybe one
> day it will be useful to me) and surely not very experienced about using 
> emacs.
> I am running Debian testing on my box and installed both emacs and slime from
> Debian repositories.

Welcome to this little known part of the world!

> I am a bit puzzled: if I create a file test.lisp with the trivial content:
>
> (+ 1 2)
>
> and then I load it then both the lisp mode and slime mode are automatically
> enabled.
> However, if I try positioning the cursor and using  C-x C-e I get the message
>
> Not connected.

To run slime type M-x slime RET. Note that you might have to set
`inferior-lisp-program' if slime cannot the lisp set in there. For instance, my
setting is:

(setq inferior-lisp-program "sbcl --noinform")

... but I do not know what dependency slime declares under Debian, if any. Might
be sbcl, cmucl or even clisp.

>
> If I disable the  slime (M-x slime-mode), then C-x C-e returns the obvious 
> value
> 3.

This is the Emacs lisp interpreter evaluating the expression. To know what
command a keychord invokes, prepend it with C-h k. In your example, looking at
the output of C-h k C-x C-e in both modes would have revealed that two distinct
commands are being invoked.

On a trivial level as this, CL and emacs lisp can understand each other
perfectly. Emacs lisp (or elisp) is the 'extension language' of Emacs and quite
similar to Common Lisp until it comes to bindings, reader macros and so
forth. It has its own REPL at M-x ielm RET in case you are interested in hacking
Elisp.

> What am I doing wrong? What I am seeing does not look much like the video at:
>
> http://www.unixuser.org/~euske/vnc2swf/slime.html
>
> In case it matters, I can post the .emacs file I am using.
> Many thanks
>
> Lorenzo
>
>
>
Enjoy exploring LISP/Emacs,

niels.
-- 
http://niels.kicks-ass.org