[vial-devel] Re: Flexichain and Cursorchain

[Brad Beveridge]

On 23/10/06, Brad Beveridge <brad.beveridge at gmail.com> wrote:
> If it's not nailed down, steal it.  That's my motto.  Vial originally
> started life as a fun way to learn Common Lisp, which meant doing some
> stuff myself that maybe I shouldn't have.
> Particularly the buffer stuff.
> It might be worthwhile moving to Flexichain
> (http://common-lisp.net/project/flexichain/), which is the underlying
> implementation that Climacs uses for buffer management.
>
> I'm going to look at it harder tonight, and if I do decide to change
> then it will probably mean big changes for Vial's internal code - but
> probably changes that clean the code up quite a bit.
> If we do move to flexichain, the first step will be to abstract out
> all the code that currently plays with the internals of buffer or
> cursor objects, then re-implement those functions using Flexichain.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Cheers
> Brad
>
I've looked at Flexichain tonight.  It is a good idea, and worth
moving to.  However I want to get something done, and changing out the
buffer, cursor and undo system is a good chunk of work.  So
Flexichains are not going to happen anytime soon.  However, we will
start tightening up abstraction.  Right now lots of modules directly
use the internal bits of various classes, that is going to stop.  The
next few changes I make will probably be with cleaning up intermodule
interfaces.

Cheers
Brad