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From: narten@arthur.cs.purdue.edu (Thomas Narten)
Newsgroups: comp.emacs
Subject: need (serious) documentation on writing packages
Message-ID: <844@arthur.cs.purdue.edu>
Date: Mon, 19-Jan-87 10:11:14 EST
Article-I.D.: arthur.844
Posted: Mon Jan 19 10:11:14 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 20-Jan-87 20:31:43 EST
Organization: Department of Computer Science, Purdue University
Lines: 37

I have recently switched from gosmacs to gnumacs, and I have had much
trouble porting some of my mlisp packages to run under gnumacs. The main
problem I have had is that I have no documentation on writing packages or
detailed explanations of what primitives there are and what they do. I have
looked at several packages that come with Gnumacs, but am still frustrated.

I have the "GNU Emacs Manual", fifth edition, version 18, October 86.
Unfortunately it is geared toward novice users and its explanations stick
pretty much with how to use existing packages. I find the explanation on
specific commands to be insufficient. Here are some of the things I need to
know.

1) What are the basic primitives (i.e. builtin, from which all others are
built), and what exactly do they do? The explanations given in "GNU Emacs
Manual" are in general too simple and do not give concise detailed
definitions of what the functions do. In addition, there are many functions
that are not described here, and no distinction is made between functions 
that are basic primitive and those that are lisp functions.

2) Is there a recursive-edit that follows that of gosmacs? In particular, I
want to have a C mode where I can enter comment-mode, during which newlines
are mapped to "\n * " for instance, whereas normally they  map to newline
and indent. Furthermore, I want to be able to enter and exit this mode
without explicitely saving keymaps (or worse--specific key bindings) on
entry and restoring them on exit. In gosmacs, recursive-edit save the
current bindings restoring them on exit. This allows one to enter a new
mode, rebind keys at will knowing that the original bindings will be
restored on exit. I have looked at text-mode and c-mode, but haven't been
able to find what I want.

3) Has someone written anything up on how to write packages? If so, how can
it be attained? I would be surprised to learn that I am the first one to
have trouble writing packages.

-- 
Thomas Narten
narten@cs.purdue.EDU or {ihnp4, allegra}!purdue!narten