Re: GSoC Question

[Sam S. <sd...@gn...>]

Hi,

> * Graham Smith <tenunzf@hpuvpntb.rqh> [2012-04-02 15:59:36 -0500]:
>
> My name is Graham Smith, and I'm a student at the University of
> Chicago.  I'm very interested in working on a project concerning
> CLISP, specifically the one about embedding CLISP into Firefox or
> LibreOffice. However, I am not sure I have a very good idea of what
> that would entail. Could anyone clarify that project?

The basic idea is to make the target application (FF or LO) extensible
with CLISP the same way Emacs is extensible with Emacs Lisp.
E.g., the end result should be that one can write a common lisp program
which can be used to do something useful in the target application.
Say, you select some lisp code in FF or LO, press a button or hit a key,
and the code is evaluated and inserted in the Office window (or
displayed as a pop-up in the browser). Or you select a roman numeral,
and a lisp function is called to convert it to the normal representation
(or vice versa). Or you select some text in the editor, and let the
embedded clisp shuffle it.

All this can, of course, be done by running an inferior clisp process
and communicating with it via a pipe of socket, sending and receiving
text.  This, however, is not enough for this project: the idea here is
that CLISP should be able to call the application functions directly.
E.g., consider embedding CLISP into a spreadsheet. Not only one should
be able to use a lisp function just like one now can use AVERAGE or
STDEV, but the lisp function should be able to call the spreadsheet
functions like PLOT or PIVOT.

It might be easier to start with an application which already is
extensible with several other languages, e.g., vim embeds python, ruby
and perl, so this could be the low-hanging fruit.

-- 
Sam Steingold (http://sds.podval.org/) on Ubuntu 11.10 (oneiric) X 11.0.11004000
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