RE: [h-e-w] Re: connection from ntemacs to COM

[Peter Milliken]

What about Pymacs? 

The following is the intro at http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard/pymacs/:

"What is Pymacs?

Pymacs is a powerful tool which, once started from Emacs, allows both-way
communication between Emacs Lisp and Python. Yet, Pymacs aims Python as an
extension language for Emacs rather than the other way around; this
assymetry is reflected in some design choices. Within Emacs Lisp code, one
may load and use Python modules. Python functions may themselves use Emacs
services, and handle Emacs Lisp objects kept in Emacs Lisp space. "

I assume there is some basic libraries around for Python that would
allow/provide the primitives for communicating with COM objects? (I am not
an expert in COM at all so this might be an incredibly naive statement :-)).

Just a thought,
Peter


-----Original Message-----
From: Richard M. Heiberger [mailto:address@hidden
Sent: Tuesday, December 10, 2002 12:11 PM
To: address@hidden; Dr Francis J. Wright; Syver Enstad
Cc: Help Emacs Windows
Subject: Re: [h-e-w] Re: connection from ntemacs to COM


Thank you all for the comments.  Syver Enstad's response as to why
we need COM access is pretty close to mine.  In my field, Statistics,
the major software packages on Windows use the COM interface.  The ESS
(Emacs Speaks Statistics
http://software.biostat.washington.edu/ess/ess-5.1.24.tar.gz) that I
coauthor
allows much control of the software from emacs.  It doesn't allow complete
control because ESS uses the emacs-*/bin/ddeclient.exe to communicate.
ddeclient is general, but it allows only one-way communication.  Further
most Windows software has only a limited interface with DDE.  Mostly they
use COM and then they allow complete interaction.  Something as simple a
pickup up a region in emacs and dropping it into a specific subwindow of
another process is not possible without COM.  Even harder is highlighting
a region in another process and then telling emacs to go get it.

In terms that ed grissom suggested, I guess I want "Emacs to be a IDispatch
driver for generic COM objects."  I don't want to become an expert at
Windows
internals.  I probably don't want to be an expert in Perl.  I am very good
at elisp, which I am sure is powerful enough to do the communications task
with COM if the right primitives are made available.  My request is for
a knowledgeable Windows expert to write a wrapper around COM so I can access
it directly from emacs lisp.

cygwin doesn't deal with this issue at all.  It provides the Unix utilities
to the Windows environment.  It doesn't make the Windows COM interface
available
to the unix programmer (as far as I know).

Rich



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