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Comment by mtraven | Hacker News Reader

Still waiting for a REPL that could what Lisp Machines could do in the early 80s -- namely integrate graphics with object-specific behavior.

http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/6946

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Lisp_Interface_Manager

http://www.sts.tu-harburg.de/~r.f.moeller/uims-clim/clim-int...

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I think [Racket][1] does this.

[1]: http://racket-lang.org

Here is a direct link to a tutorial that shows off graphics in the Racket REPL: http://docs.racket-lang.org/quick/index.html

There's a listener written with McClim that's easily installable with quicklisp. It's the one captured in the wikipedia article screenshot actually.

(ql:quickload 'clim-listener) (clim-listener:run-listener)

I wish Emacs would provide a canvas like API to draw in buffers. That way integrated graphics could be easily added. This would create a completely new Emacs experience.

There is an Artist Mode for Emacs. The "pictures" are ASCII-esque ;) http://www.cinsk.org/emacs/emacs-artist.html

I know. But for serious application a real drawing capability is needed. This should actually be possible to implement on top of the GTK+ layer.

Do you know if Mathematica does what you're describing? Mathematica functions and calculations can take arbitrary objects as arguments. Example: http://blog.wolfram.com/2008/12/01/the-incredible-convenienc...

And arbitrary objects can take the role of unique values. It's quite convenient, especially considering that Mathematica's language and display system let you put arbitrary expressions anywhere you want (like a 3D plot animation used as the surface texture of a 3D cube).

Why waiting?

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