[slime-devel] SLIME with AllegroCL on Windows - dumb question

[Edi Weitz]

Hi!

Attention: Question shows again my complete Emacs ignorance.

I've recently begun to use the combination mentioned in the subject.
I use a setup as described by Bill Clementson which mainly looks like
this:

  (global-set-key
   [(f6)]
   '(lambda ()
      (interactive)
      (shell-command "c:/PROGRA~1/acl70/alisp.exe +B +cm -L ~/.slime.lisp&")
      (slime-connect "localhost" 4005)))

This works fine most of the time but sometimes fails with

  Connecting to Swank on port 4005..
  open-network-stream: make client process failed: connection refused, :name, SLIME Lisp, :buffer, nil, :host, localhost, :service, 4005

which obviously happens if AllegroCL is not quite ready to accept
connections when SLIME tries to connect.  I can fix this with adding
something like sit-for before the call to slime-connect but either I
wait too long which makes the call unnecessary slow or I'm still in a
time frame where the error described above can happen.

Question: Can I replace the call to sit-for with something that waits
until AllegroCL is ready?  Or is there a better solution to start
AllegroCL from SLIME under Windows?

Thanks,
Edi.