SLIME tidbits (2009-05-14)

First a small addendum: In my previous blog entry I demonstrated the improved font-lock magic in Slime to shadow forms suppressed by reader conditionals. Anyone who succumbed to the temptation and updated their Slime checkout, should really update to today's HEAD. There has been a couple of issues which have been fixed meanwhile.

In this blog posting I'll demonstrate my work on Slime's inspector for STANDARD-OBJECTs. Previously it looked like this:

I always found the [set value] and [make unbound]buttons after each slot entry pretty distracting, if not to say annoying. So I spent some time to replace them with a checklist as follows:

Quite cool that you can do this with Slime's inspector! Notice that I did not have to touch a single Elisp code line for all this.

You may have noticed the new [group slots by inheritance] button: by default the slots are sorted alphabetically by their name. After pressing this button, however, the slots will be grouped according to the class they were inherited from. Or in CLOS terminology: according to the class they're direct slots of.

SLIME tidbits (2009-05-02)

Since a long time SLIME tries to highlight forms specially that are suppressed due to reader conditionals. That feature has never worked reliably for me; sometimes such forms were highlighted, but most often not. And even if they were highlighted, redisplay (or rather refontification) would often remove the highlighting again.

While resuming to work on my named-readtables library -- which includes a little bit of portability glue --, I became annoyed^W intrigued enough to take a look at the cause of this non-deterministic behaviour.

The issue took more effort than I'd have initially expected. But as you can see from the screen shot, it should be fixed now. It shows the FINALIZE function from the trivial-garbage project. (I hope planet.lisp reader will be able to see the image, too.)