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Re: [h-e-w] Re: connection from ntemacs to COM


From: Richard M. Heiberger
Subject: Re: [h-e-w] Re: connection from ntemacs to COM
Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2002 20:11:15 -0500 (EST)

Thank you all for the comments.  Syver Enstad's response as to why
we need COM access is pretty close to mine.  In my field, Statistics,
the major software packages on Windows use the COM interface.  The ESS
(Emacs Speaks Statistics
http://software.biostat.washington.edu/ess/ess-5.1.24.tar.gz) that I coauthor
allows much control of the software from emacs.  It doesn't allow complete
control because ESS uses the emacs-*/bin/ddeclient.exe to communicate.
ddeclient is general, but it allows only one-way communication.  Further
most Windows software has only a limited interface with DDE.  Mostly they
use COM and then they allow complete interaction.  Something as simple a
pickup up a region in emacs and dropping it into a specific subwindow of
another process is not possible without COM.  Even harder is highlighting
a region in another process and then telling emacs to go get it.

In terms that ed grissom suggested, I guess I want "Emacs to be a IDispatch
driver for generic COM objects."  I don't want to become an expert at Windows
internals.  I probably don't want to be an expert in Perl.  I am very good
at elisp, which I am sure is powerful enough to do the communications task
with COM if the right primitives are made available.  My request is for
a knowledgeable Windows expert to write a wrapper around COM so I can access
it directly from emacs lisp.

cygwin doesn't deal with this issue at all.  It provides the Unix utilities
to the Windows environment.  It doesn't make the Windows COM interface available
to the unix programmer (as far as I know).

Rich



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