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Re: text buffers


"Marisha Ray & Neil Jerram" <mpriz@dircon.co.uk> writes:

> From: Klaus Schilling <Klaus.Schilling@home.ivm.de>
> 
> I've also been wondering about implementing buffers, and have a few more
> questions that I'd like to throw into the stream.
> 1. What is wrong with simply porting the existing buffer code in Emacs and
> giving it a SCM interface?

Quite a bit ;) A lot of the code in emacs is mostly unnecesssary for
buffers that are, essentially, just places to put big chunks of data,
where you can move around easily and munge at will. Plus, there's that
whole mule/multibyte thing (bleah!).

> 2. Should Guile's buffers be designed to be more general than text buffers,
> i.e. to be buffers (ordered sequences) of arbitrary SCM objects?  (Think
> music, rich text, whatever... )

It may be useful. Essentially, a buffer doesn't have a clue what's in
it, and it's up to the programmer to decide how to treat it, so having
buffers that can hold any arbitrary thing might be a bit of overkill.

> 3. I assume that we want to also support overlays / intervals / "text"
> properties.  Correct?

I don't think there's any real purpose. As far as I can see, those are
strictly for the display of the text, and since we aren't going to be
actually displaying the text, we don't care what it looks like. 

-- 
Greg