cl-repl VS colisper

But you don't have syntax highlighting :( On errors, the debugger looks arcane… cl-repl or sbcli might help. With sbcli, you even don't have the interactive debugger, only the stacktrace. It's easier for beginners (or for quick development). They are based on readline and do some things well (match parenthesis, multiline input for cl-repl).

In order to get syntax highlighting as well as tab completion I have been using cl-repl. I have been having this issue, as well as another issue with cl-repl inheriting some stuff, but do not seem to have the same issue in sbcl either. Could it be a bug in cl-repl? Is there a solid alternative for sbcl?

If you are doing it for learning, that's fine! But otherwise you could check out and contribute to Alive for VSCode. There's also cl-repl which I think can be distributed in the form of binary images.

Then, of course, a solution is to run the scripts from our editor… or from a friendly terminal-based interface? There's Lish, the Lem editor (for CL, Python and other languages), friendly REPLs… (cl-repl)

Without Lem, how do you edit files? We need to edit and load files in the REPL. magic-ed could help. What if before loading the file, we added some style criticisms? The lisp-critic is waiting to be adopted and expanded (while colisper has too simple rules).

Nice! Reminds me of Comby, which makes it easy to match & replace s-exprs too. https://comby.dev/ (I have this POC for predefined Lisp rules: colisper (warn: just a POC))

It's also possible to run emacs in batch mode to indent a file: https://github.com/vindarel/colisper/blob/master/emacs-batch-indent.el I don't recall, maybe it won't fix very ill-indented files.

You can find examples here: https://github.com/g000001/lisp-critic (lisp-rules.lisp) and to a smaller extent, here: https://github.com/vindarel/colisper (src/catalogue directory). The lisp-critic is available by default on this custom readline REPL: https://ciel-lang.github.io/CIEL/#/repl?id=friendly-lisp-critic so it can be tried at the terminal (in conjunction with the %edit command). It would be nice if it had better editor integration though. (it shouldn't be too hard, there's one function (critique-file pathname) to call on a file).

This kind of stuff should be checked by static analysis tools. I added a rule in colisper (Comby underneath) to check that sort is followed by copy-seq. (best case right now, it doesn't match global vars with earmuffs). I looked at the lisp-critic, it has no check for sort but is a good candidate.

I started colisper, based on Comby, whose goals are 1) to warn about code smells, according to rules you can also define (not unlike the lisp-critic) and 2) rewrite code, including from Emacs. So, it doesn't answer your examples (see sblint), but it might help for the "other metrics".