Wisdom and Wonder » Programming

DrScheme Style Buffer Evaluation for OCaml in Emacs

Grant — Thu, 27 May 2010 02:56:21 +0000

When you want to evaluate code inside of DrScheme, you hit the F5 key and the entire editor buffer gets evaluated inside of a new REPL. Unlike Emacs, the ability to send the current expression, region, or buffer to the REPL isn’t available. It might sound constricting, but in practice it is very nice because you are always working with the most up-to-date versions of your definitions. It might sound slow to start a new REPL on each run, but it isn’t; on my older desktop the new REPL comes up before my finger even comes off of the F5 key. This approach seemed like a nice to have for working with OCaml in Tuareg mode on Emacs, so I pieced together a function to do so against Tuareg 1.45.6:

(defun tuareg-eval-buffer-drscheme-style ()
  "Send the buffer to a brand new Tuareg Interactive process."
  (interactive)
  (tuareg-kill-caml)
  (sleep-for 0.25)
  (if (get-buffer tuareg-interactive-buffer-name)
      (kill-buffer tuareg-interactive-buffer-name))
  (tuareg-eval-buffer)
  (switch-to-buffer tuareg-interactive-buffer-name))

Out of the box Tuareg mode will ask you what program name to run to start OCaml each and every time you evaluate the buffer, even when the variable storing that name is defined. I didn’t find a way to avoid this prompt so I patched Tuareg such that it will not ask you if a value is already defined for the program name. Here is the patch.

Thus far it has been nice to have the option of evaluating the whole buffer in a new REPL in addition to the existing incremental evaluation options.

Tuareg mode has new maintainers

Grant — Tue, 25 May 2010 16:51:32 +0000

Maintenance of the Tuareg mode for Emacs has been taken over by some Jane Street Capital folks and can be found here on OCamlCore.

(via caml-list)

Emacs 23.2 is out

Grant — Sat, 08 May 2010 12:14:06 +0000

(via gmame via Alex)

Maven and Idea

Grant — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 19:37:01 +0000

Here is how to ask Maven to generate Idea project files for you:

mvn idea:idea -DjdkName=1.5

(via Maven)

Dynamic Languages Wizards Series

Grant — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 21:12:53 +0000

While I haven’t watched these yet; they do sound interesting.

(via dhess)

The aim of a language

Grant — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 02:20:46 +0000

to turn ideas into software, quickly and faithfully

– John Chambers

Great aim!

A Pattern Repository for Parallel Programming

Grant — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 20:50:07 +0000

Here is a repository for parallel programming patterns.

(via pinku)

The Bipolar Lisp Programmer

Grant — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 20:44:29 +0000

Ben referred us to this article (cached here) in the midst of a discussion about, among other things, why there is still no FFI in the Scheme standard.

That article is really interesting.

What did you think about it?

Conway’s Law

Grant — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 14:55:03 +0000

Conway’s Law is not intended to be a joke or nasty witticism:

…organizations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

– Melvin Conway

(via Fare via Wikipedia)

Elastic tabstops

Grant — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 04:58:15 +0000

The argument: Code an in editor should be dynamically formatted using something like intelligent table-based layouts.

Seems like an OK idea. Read about it here.