Hello all!
As some of you may know Gnu Apl has been very recently released
http://www.gnu.org/software/apl/I feel in the modern unicoded world, APL may be more usable than it has ever been, so having a modern (unicode-based) Apl running on Gnu/Linux systems is quite a big thing. [Well at least for some old-fogeys :-) ]
I asked the author Juergen Sauermann if there was an emacs mode.
He asked 'Whats a mode? " :-) . He agreed that if I provided one he would put it in.
Is anyone working on this??
For the time being Ive put together something minimal by
a. taking scheme.el, cmuscheme.el
b. search-replace-ing scheme by apl
c. Do the minimal hacking required to make it work
d. Throw out obviously unneeded parts (like DSSSL stuff)
Also looking at perl and ada modes for characters, fontlock etc.
Any preferable sources to study/copy from?
I tried to study C-mode(s) but it was too vast to make sense :-(
About syntax:
What does sexp mean for non-lisp languages like C etc?
(Needed for functions like forward-sexp)
About Font lock:
APL is notorious for being unreadable. This is related to having almost no keywords and only weird characters.
Having a good coloration for different categories of characters will help a long way.
Is there somewhere I can 8-10 different faces ready?
And how faces are used in programming modes?
Input methods:
Current input method supplied by Juergen is xmodmap based.
We need other more emacsy method(s). I'll write about that subsequently, if I can get the above working :-)
Rusi