Meta-Programming In Emacs Using defadvice

1 Introduction

This blog article Meta Programming In Python reminded me to write up the equivalent for Emacs Lisp. Decorators in Python enable you to modify the vehavior of existing functions without changing the original function; Advice in Lisp which traces back to the 80's enables similar functionality — incidentally, Advice was the inspiration behind Aspect Oriented Programming in Java.

2 Advice And Emacs Lisp

Advice came to Emacs lisp in the summer of 1994, when module advice.el shipped as part of Emacs 19.23. A few weeks later, a colleague at work (Win Treese) wrote up a simple example that added a before advice to the vc-checkin functions of the time to create an RCS subdirectory if one did not exist. This was such a neat trick that all of us in our Lab adopted it — and having random RCS*,v* files lying around in the working directory became history.

3 Emacspeak And Advice — Fall 1994

And then I decided to make Emacs speak to me. Module advice.el provided the ability to add before, after, or around advice. In brief, Emacspeak used these three classes of advice as follows:

  1. Speak line moved to after next-line and previous-line — add an after advice that called function emacspeak-speak-line.
  2. Speak character being deleted — Add a before advice that speaks the character under point before it is deleted.
  3. Get various types of completion spoken — Add an around advice that remembers the current context, calls the original function being adviced, and finally speak the current context that now reflects the completion.

The rest of the story was written up a few years ago as Emacspeak At Twenty. Fast-forwarding 25 years, present versions of Emacs still include module advice.el as well as an arguably simplified front-end implemented by module nadvice.el that enables the definition of custom functions that are then attached to existing code via advice.

4 References

  1. Emacspeak At Twenty, Looking Back, Looking Forward.
  2. emacspeak: The Complete Audio Desktop. Chapter from the book entitled Beautiful Code, OReilly.

Date: 2019-10-16 Wed 00:00

Author: T.V Raman

Created: 2019-10-16 Wed 14:25

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