Programming project 2004 - 2005

• Title:

  Implementation of a buffer protocol for Emacs
  

• Name of person proposing the project

  Robert Strandh
  

• Address, Telephone, email:

  Bureau 323, Bâtiment du LaBRI (A30), 0540 00 60 84, strandh@labri.fr

  
  

• Description of the work to be accomplished:

  The purpose of the project is to implement a protocol (the definition of which will be supplied) for managing a buffer of text (Unicode) efficiently. The protocol contains functionality for modifying and accessing the contents of the buffer, and for maintaining a certain number of marks corresponding to positions in the buffer.

  In order to allow a compact representation of the characters in the buffer when few of them are outside of the range defined by ISO-latin-1, while still allowing all Unicode characters to be present, the physical representation consists of a 2-3-tree (which might be supplied) of lines of text, each line being represented by a flexichain of characters (the implementation of which will be supplied).

  
  

• Required hardware and software:

  A PC with GNU/Linux. A recent version (at least 0.8.17) of the SBCL system (a free implementation of Common Lisp), GNU Emacs, SLIME (Superior Lisp Interaction Mode for Emacs), and possibly McCLIM.

  
  

• Bibliographic- and web references: :

  • Description of the Climacs project
  • Description of the "buffer" protocol
  • Description of the "undo" protocol
  • Description of the "syntax" protocol
  • Lisp code
  • SBCL
  • SLIME
  • McCLIM
  • Cliki, a Common Lisp wiki
  • The Craft of Text Editing by Craig A. Finseth