[LispM-Hackers] Fep

James A. Crippen james@UnLambda.COM
Fri, 16 Mar 2001 00:44:51 -0900 (AKST)


I've just started stubbing in a Front End Processor.  'fep.cc' and 'fep.h'
are where it will live, and I'm looking at gluing it into main() just
after the call to e3App::app().  The basic concept I have is that after
the e3App stuff finishes in main() then the Fep will start in its
loop.  From there the user can init the system (which is just doing that
'new' alloc), load a band, and enter the run loop.

I think that some exception handling should be put together so that
anywhere that the system crashes it just drops back into the FEP with some
diagnostic info and lets the user probe around and twiddle bits.  If an
exception can't be handled by Lisp (which means most of the problems that
we'll be dealing with) then it can dump to the FEP so we can examine it.

I have a couple of questions regarding portability.  The absolute easiest
interface for making command line interpreters, and the one that I have
some experience with, is readline.  That's a GNU lib.  It won't be
available on all platforms naturally.  Should I use it anyway?  Should I
cruft my own parser together?  Or should I try to support both?

'james

-- 
James A. Crippen <james@unlambda.com> ,-./-.  Anchorage, Alaska,
Lambda Unlimited: Recursion 'R' Us   |  |/  | USA, 61.2069 N, 149.766 W,
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