Re: pretty-lambdas

[Luke Gorrie <address@hidden>]

kragen@pobox.com (Kragen Sitaker) writes:

> > You need to have an appropriate font installed - more on that in the
> > usenet thread that comes up first on a search for "pretty lambda" at
> > groups.google.com. I don't know if this works on Emacsen other than
> > GNU version 21.
> 
> It doesn't work in "21.4 (patch 6) "Common Lisp" XEmacs Lucid", but it
> does indeed work in GNU Emacs 21.  (My Greek font looks hideous,
> though.)

There are several lambda character codes available in Emacs, and they
get rendered in different fonts on some machines. The usenet thread
has some more details that might help to make things look nice. On my
Debian machine I installed all the font packages it had available,
and ended up with very nice lambda characters.

A simpler alternative is to just use a '\' character, by changing:
  ,(make-char 'greek-iso8859-7 107)
to:
  ?\\

An existing font-lock rule will colour the \ as a keyword (recognising
it as 'lambda'), so it won't be ambiguous (provided you use colours.)

Cheers,
Luke