Re: [tlug] (x)emacs front-ends (was: Mozilla - comment and questions)

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

>>>>> "Viktor" == Viktor Pavlenko <vvp@example.com> writes:

    Viktor> It seems to be the preferable approach to adding new emacs
    Viktor> capabilities: creating front-ends to external (and fast)
    Viktor> applications. That's how dict in emacs works, for
    Viktor> instance.

The idea that Lisp is slow in user apps is old news and no longer
true.   As long as you're a little careful in choosing algorithms,
Lisp (even Emacs Lisp) is plenty fast.  The new all-in-Lisp
implementations of Egg and Canna, and the all-in-Lisp implementation
of BBDB prove that.  In fact, if the app requires a little bit of
intelligence, Lisp can be faster than C simply because people have
done a lot of work on making Lisp do certain things fast, while naive
algorithms in C are often quadratic or worse.  This is rare, of
course.  What's not so rare is segfaults in C code, while they're very
unusual in Lisp.  (The same is also true of Python or Perl, of course,
but you don't have the advantages of having them embedded in the best
editor available.)  A segfault can ruin your whole day...,

    Viktor> Some time ago there was edb elisp database
    Viktor> implementation. If there is any db front-ends for emacs,
    Viktor> is anyone on the list using them?

There's sql-mode by Alex Schroeder (IIRC), which can be used to access
most SQL-capable databases.  I'm not sure whether it uses shell apps
like pgsql, or talks to them directly via sockets.

There's EUDC (Emacs Unified Directory Client) which provides a single
API to BBDB and LDAP and a couple of other directory databases.  In
XEmacs it uses the native interfaces.

In XEmacs there are native interfaces for g?dbm, Berkeley db, ldap,
and postgresql.

I've used the native postgresql interface; it rocks compared to doing
the same kind of thing from the client of in C.


-- 
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences     http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
 My nostalgia for Icon makes me forget about any of the bad things.  I don't
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