Status Update, Elisp Compiler

[Daniel Kraft]

Hi Andy,

I'm off from tomorrow until Sunday, and as GSoC seems to 'officially' 
have ended, I wanted to give you a brief update on my status and plans:

Well, as to the status of the elisp compiler, you probably know -- it 
basically works, just missing are a lot of built-ins and some special stuff.

I do of course plan to continue working on it, though, no matter if GSoC 
is officially finished (hey, I did start late, so its just fair :D).  My 
definite plans to when I'm back are

1) Working further on the elisp reader I've just started (but nothing 
useful so far) to work on, as Ludo suggested I'll do it in Scheme and 
look into SILex / (text parse/lalr), but am not sure what of these I'll 
use or just hand-write.

2) Creating some kind of documentation that is more than my current, 
vague README-file (and the comments in the source code).

3) Implementing some more advanced stuff, advicing functions comes to 
mind (I've just never cared so far, I think this should be not too hard 
by creating some lambdas on the fly or the like).

4) I've not done anything yet regarding converting '() -> %nil in lists 
that are seen from elisp; I think the final conclusion was that we want 
such a conversion, and so I will do that.  But maybe I can try if it is 
reasonably possible to allow switching it off to regain performance 
without?  Maybe also allow switching off the #f -> %nil conversion for 
booleans (t = #t).

5) Other stuff that may come up at some time, like fixing bugs (of 
course), working on performance improvements (I bet a lot are still 
possible without going far) or helping with conversion to guile-emacs 
from the guile side.  This of course depends on the time I'll have to 
spend at the respective time and that might be not much during the 
autumn/winter because of university, but we'll see.  And at least a 
little should always be possible ;)

Yours,
Daniel

PS: I just remembered that the Elisp compiler still uses #f as %nil, 
although it can be switched easily at a single place.  What's the status 
of the patch fixing %nil false-ness?

--
Done:  Arc-Bar-Cav-Ran-Rog-Sam-Tou-Val-Wiz
To go: Hea-Kni-Mon-Pri