Perl 6

[Tom Browder]

There is an emacs version of a Perl 6 mode on github at:

https://github.com/hinrik/perl6-mode

Unfortunately it seems to depend on one or more other emacs packages which
I don't believe have any XEmacs versions.

Is anyone interested in porting the Perl 6 package collection to XEmacs--or
at least helping a non-lisp programmer do it?

Thanks.

Best regards,

-Tom

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Post by Tom Browder
https://github.com/hinrik/perl6-mode
Unfortunately it seems to depend on one or more other emacs packages which
I don't believe have any XEmacs versions.
Is anyone interested in porting the Perl 6 package collection to XEmacs--or
at least helping a non-lisp programmer do it?

This may be next to impossible, because the code uses lexical scoping,
a feature which XEmacs doesn't yet have. Perhaps it can be emulated
with lexical-let from the cl.el package, but there are other contexts
besides let-binding where this difference can matter.

I don't know whether the font-lock features will work correctly, as
font-locking in Emacs has diverged greatly from what we have.

As far as packages go, it only seems to require Stefan Monnier's
"smie", but I don't know how hard that will be to port.

I personally can't help much with the lexical binding issue, as I've
never worked with it. I agree that theoretically it's the Right
Thing, but practically I've always been perfectly satisfied with the
results of Emacs Lisp's traditional dynamic scope.

If we can get over that hump, I'll be happy to consult on font-lock
and other aspects of the port, but most of my hacking time for the
next few months is going to be devoted to GSoC so I can't do a lot of
the work myself.

Steve