3:17:58aethcan't do dot-based auto-complete easily in CL, anyway. (action foo ...) means you typed action already, unlike foo.action, which can be done when you start with a foo
3:18:29aethand the editor can start autocompleting ACTION like it can autocomplete )
3:19:15aeth( foo is bad style, so it wouldn't hurt to autocomplete on foo there.
3:25:21fiddlerwoaroofApropos has a similar downside in CL
3:25:47fiddlerwoaroofEspecially because the EXTERNAL-ONLY argument defaults to nil
3:26:59fiddlerwoaroof(I guess that's a sbcl extension, but I think the standard specifies searching all the symbols, rather than only external symbols)
3:35:58beachaeth: That might be a good idea actually.
3:42:47fiddlerwoaroofI'd like to figure out an autocomplete protocol for things like SLIME
3:43:43fiddlerwoaroofFor example, if I do (MAKE-INSTANCE '<TAB>, there's enough information to know that I'm probably looking for a class name
3:43:55fiddlerwoaroofBut the typical autocomplete shows a lot of irrelevant symbols
3:44:40verisimilitudeJust travel back to the last millennium and use a Lisp Machine.
3:46:08verisimilitudeJoking aside, I support the idea of properly qualifying programmers; one method to get the idiots out would be corporal punishment for programming flaws.
3:47:42beachfiddlerwoaroof: Indeed. The main problem with autocompletion is to limit the number of choices to the relevant ones.
3:49:50verisimilitudeThat would require manual tagging of someone, and naive autocompletion gets most of the way there anyway, is part of the problem.
3:50:33fiddlerwoaroofFor a lot of things, you could have a method with an eql specializer on the CAR of the form
3:51:03verisimilitudeOh, so an autocompletion method that returns, say, a list?
3:51:16fiddlerwoaroof(and, to be precise, a generic function)
3:51:28verisimilitudeStill, someone would need to do some manual tagging for this at the beginning.
3:51:54fiddlerwoaroofYeah, although things like "does the symbol name a class" can be determined somewhat automatically
3:52:11verisimilitudeRight, I've not spent much time in Lisp lately, so I'd forgotten that terminology.
3:52:31fiddlerwoaroofAnd you could also do things like use declared argument types to narrow completion
3:52:56fiddlerwoaroofe.g. I've come across a couple functions that use a MEMBER type to specify which symbols are valid for a particular argument
3:54:12verisimilitudeMy system doesn't even have a working M-. and so I never found the autocompletion particularly lacking.
3:54:52verisimilitudeIt seems like a lot of work for questionable gain, to me.
3:55:09verisimilitudeI'm being a negative nancy, though.
3:55:29aethYes. My M-. in CL also somehow broke. Idk how or where. It's sometimes annoying, but usually I can just grep and lose a few seconds so it's not really worth the few hours to fix it.
3:56:18fiddlerwoaroofI have never had this issue :)
3:56:50fiddlerwoaroof(as everyone knows "works on my machine" is the best response to a bug report)
3:57:10aethI do have a few elaborate macros where it's non-obvious to know where things are defined (since I assumed a working M-.), but they're my macros, so I know.
3:58:32verisimilitudeI mostly use Lisp as a decent window into my computer, where I can perform useful automation, but typing a programming language into my machine to get basic computing feels more like a compromise than an ideal.
4:33:25phantomicsverisimilitude: corporal punishment for programming flaws would also require manual tagging of someone
5:00:25verisimilitudeYes, but the added value is a bit better in that case.