OK.  So I'm going to write a text editor for my masters' thesis.  The
general idea of it is fixed but the extension language has not been
settled on, yet.  I have thought of, in the footsteps of editors such as
Emacs and its clones, using some version of LISP or Scheme, possibly
GNU's Guile[1], or Jade's librep[2].  LISP-like languages have proved
very successful in describing the way we edit text and is thus a sure
bet.  It would, however, perhaps be of interest to use another language
to try the waters.  In my previous editor (slackedit/sled[3]) I used
Tcl[4] as an extension language, and it proved very easy to use, but I
never got far enough to actually give it a good run.

Anyway, what I'm getting at is:

Do you figure Ruby to be a good extension language for a text editor?
* What would be easier to do using Ruby?
* LISP?
* What language allows the most of the editing commands to be written in
  the given language?
* Is Ruby good enough for the task at the moment, performance wise?
* Resource wise?  Does anyone have any statistics on this?

I'm not talking about the ease of implementing a web browser in the
target language, rather the ease of structuring an extensible framework
in it.

Also, is there any way of redefining the // operator for constructing
regular expression objects?  I'm planning on implementing a new regex
syntax for the editor (to make searches/substitutions easier to
describe).

thanks in advance,
	nikolai

[1] http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/
[2] http://librep.sourceforge.net/
[3] http://www.pcppopper.org/code/win/sled/
[4] http://www.scriptics.com/

--
::: name: Nikolai Weibull    :: aliases: pcp / lone-star / aka :::
::: born: Chicago, IL USA    :: loc atm: Gothenburg, Sweden    :::
::: page: www.pcppopper.org  :: fun atm: gf,lps,ruby,lisp,war3 :::
main(){printf(&linux["\021%six\012\0"],(linux)["have"]+"fun"-97);}