Hello,

I would really appreciate some help on this. I am trying to do just
about everything with Emacs (and Emacs Lisp) these days. One of the
things I need to do in my job is to create XML files. I thought I
would use Emacs rather than some other editor/tool.

So, I am trying to write a tool that will enable me to write specific
XML files by prompting me to enter values. Here is how I am trying to
do it.

First, I set a variable that will provide a "grammar" for my file that
Emacs will help me write. An example is the following : of course, my
actual problem is not about generating English sentences; this is just
for illustration.

(setq grammar '((sentence <- subject predicate)
(subject <- article noun)
(predicate <- verb)))

I expect to generate functions that look like this:

Oops... I got the subject wrong. Instead of

" Using setq to obtain a symbol from a list, so that I can assign a
function to it", it should read, "Using setq to assign value to the
result of a function". Sorry about that.

Regards,

SK

In article
y18g2000pre.googlegroups.com>,
srinik001@hotmail.com wrote:

Use set instead of setq.

On Mon, 21 Apr 2008 19:28:03 -0700 (PDT) srinik001@hotmail.com wrote:

You may want to look at the various templating packages available, in
case one of them does what you want. Check out skeleton.el in
particular (http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/SkeletonMode for some
examples) since any element of the template can itself be a template.
That will probably save you a lot of time.

Anytime you find yourself auto-generating functions you should wonder if
your data structure could be better (sometimes the answer is 'no' :)

Ted

Ted Zlatanov lifelogs.com> writes:

Well, I wouldn't be so categoric. You could start by writting an
"interpreter" of your data, but generating lisp is like implementing
the "compiler", so I don't see much difference. It's so easy to do it
in lisp, that you can go directly to the "compiler".

srinik001@hotmail.com writes:

Pascal Bourguignon informatimago.com> writes:

I am curious, why would this be better? I find that when an elisp program defines functions outside of the standard lisp symbols reading and modifying them becomes difficult or impossible. In the simplest scenario, simply finding out how functionality is implemented, I cannot use C-h f to jump to the doc string and ultimately, through that handy little hyperlink, source code. In a more involved case, I cannot advise, or redefine the function.

I just thought I would endose msf-abbrev-mode here.

Thank you

Timothy Hobbs

In article gnu.org>,
Timothy Hobbs gmail.com> wrote:

Most of these things are unlikely to be done for dynamically-generated
functions that are internal to an application like this. There's no
source code for that "handy little hyperlink" to point to, because the
function was created on the fly.

On Apr 22, 5:54 am, Barry Margolin alum.mit.edu> wrote:

srinik001@hotmail.com wrote:

Use set instead of setq: