Elder.el

[Deepak Goel]

hi

upon Pavel's suggestion, i am sending you all an email re: elder.el ..

ELDER is something i wrote a few years ago and now routinely use.  i
have known of one other person having used it to date.. who used it
for his online tea-database.

ELDER is basically just an emacs-lisp based preprocessor that can work
on any document.  It is very easy to get started using elder.. IMHO,
as a user will find themselves using more and more of elder, they will
find that it is well-designed.  Elder thus essentially allows me to
mix lisp (almost) arbitrarily with *any* other
packages/languages/nonpackages/nonlanguages.

NB: there'a another lisp-preprocessor out there, called elp.el (i
think).. i never got a chance to try it yet..

The current version of elder elder-3.4.2alpha comes with its own
interactive example: Type M-x elder-introduction.  For a silly
'game-of-life' , M-x elder-life.  If you ever wanna see elder work in
slow-action on any of your files, use M-x elder-substitute-n.

A detailed "help" is in the help-directory.  

Here is where to obtain it: 
http://www.glue.umd.edu/~deego/emacspub/lisp-mine/elder/



i have not been too careful about following certain gnu-conventions
like (eval-when-compile (require 'cl)) yet.. but if you deem elder fit
for GNU, will be glad to invest time in fixing these issues.

For instance: i find working in lisp so much easier to working in tex,
Thus, if there is a complex conditional i wanna use inside latex and
don't wanna fiddle with latex's (messy IMHO) syntax, i can use elder.
Moreover, i change one lisp variable at the top of <file>.tex.e and
the resulting file <file>.tex could now be a slideshow-generator
rather than an article-generator. 

As another example, imagine you were writing your own html code
file.html, and whenever you want to point to a link, you also wanted
to show the pointed link to show up on your webpage..  So you will do
<a href "www.hairy.long.link" > "www.hairy.long.link" </a>

or something right?  And you are sick of double-typing of the
www.hairy.long.link..  Come in elder.. Define a few things properly
and you will have to write a much smaller line and none of these </a>
tags..  and document writing (file.html.e) will be much easier.

In fact, suppose: you will soon find yourself using a particular set
of functions or inserting some tags too often, when for instance, you
are writing html.. then you will wanna import or (load) these
functions..  etc. etc.  But will not wannna import all the tags or
type (load) all the time...  come in elder-style files.. but that is
for later... 

Deepak                             <http://www.glue.umd.edu/~deego>
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