Build clojure expressions as elisp sexps, then print them compatibly to strings

[purcell]

Hey @samaaron, I thought you might find this interesting.

Those strings full of clojure inside ac-nrepl bugged me, so I started wondering if we could just send sexps. Turns out that it's possible; you just have to avoid some Clojure reader syntaxes (like "#{}") which are incompatible with Elisp's reader.

This trick makes assembling the sexps much easier, because they can just be backquoted together rather than relying on "format".

The downside was that it required some custom printing trickery to work around the fact that Elisp normally prints symbols like clojure.core/map as clojure\.core/map. A further minor downside is that the elisp indentation doesn't understand Clojure's indentation rules.

I'd be interested to hear what you think.

-Steve

[samaaron]

Looks nice, although the strings full of Clojure should bug us! They scream out "push me somewhere upstream!"

Additionally, although paredit friendly, I wonder whether this approach might introduce subtle bugs that might be hard to locate and squash...

[purcell]

Yeah, I'm on the fence about this one too. :-)