AutoLISP IDE
Hello everybody, especially hello BricsCAD-staff!I am painfully missing an AutoLISP-IDE in BricsCAD. Especially for debugging.Is anybody else missing it too? Will there ever be one in BricsCAD?Regards, Stephan
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This request also comes from time to time ...To be honest, it is not as easy as it looks in the first moment;I spent a lot of time to find a good IDE base system on the web - all those Lisp IDE available are from very old times, and not practically to implement.Another idea was (and is) to use Eclipse frame ... but the internal stuff is mainly focused on C/C++/C# and Java - seems to be a hard wotk to implement a Lisp system there; but again, it is possible.But the main technical problem is a different :our LispEx engine is not using an old XLisp based Lisp core - like AutoLISP does;in fact, we use a modern Lisp core engine, which is so far away from normal AutoLISP that there is an "code preprocessor" or "translator" in-between.This means, the normal AutoLISp code is translated/pre-processed to the much more modern Lisp syntax - and this transformed Lisp is then processed. The size of code is increased by ~10...20 percent, and the code really looks much different.Therefore, when a kind of debugger should be available, then the debugger/editor needs to display and use the "normal" AutoLISP code, but the engine processes different code - so there is no 1-to-1 relation.However, the idea of an IDE is not impossible to implement ... but will still need time.-----To support Lisp developers better, we also offer (trace) and (debug) funcitons, as well as a much better call stack backtrace in case of an error.
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Is there somewhere we can see the syntax of the more modern Lisp core, to see how it differs from the XLisp core?Would it be feasible or practical to give Bricscad users an option to write code using the newer syntax, bypassing the translator/preprocessor?
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We think compatibility between AutoCad and Bricscad lisp code is important. The possibility to write code using a 'more-recent' flavor of lisp is not important enough to introduce incompatibility.
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Thank you, Torsten and Hans, for your thoughtful answers to this thread. I really appreciate the attitude you folks at Bricsys have. A partner and I hope to be working soon to continue our compatibility push for the Construction Notes Manager and HawsEDC tools. Knowing you are on our team really helps.
Tom
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Textpad etc can show general lisp syntax, check parenteses etc.
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I do love such features in Notepad++, but what it and Textpad lack are three important features for me:
-Bug reporting and pinpointing. When I run a program in AutoCAD using VLISP, any fatal errors are traced to the exact call point in the source, so I can jump right to the source of the problem with no hunting. This is huge.
-Code step-through and symbol watching. I can watch variables change as I step through the code in stop motion time.
-Pretty printing. The VLISP IDE formats my code for me in the way I like. Very powerful and saves a lot of time.
A generic editor realy can't do those things, I don't think. What can?
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I've just checked with Cae-Link and they inform me they are in the process of porting their LispEditor LispLink to Bricscad.
LispLink is the closest alternative to Autocad's VLIDE, that I know of.
There's still a couple of problems to resolve, so they havn't yet established a release date. Definitely one to watch I think.
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Great! I was hoping they would do this : ) I've been a long time user of lisplink, its a good program
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