[asdf-devel] Re: Make the CL syntax predictable

[Faré]

On Fri, Mar 28, 2014 at 6:19 AM, Zach Beane <xach at xach.com> wrote:
> Faré <fahree at gmail.com> writes:
>
>> It's not a matter of lint at all.
>
> Very true. Lint is an *optional* program, and you can easily choose to
> ignore it.
>
The analogy with lint is totally bogus here. The case that was vaguely
analogous to lint indeed was the debate last year about turning
deferred-warnings on, which could have been since as analogous to
calling lint, though really, it was more like having GCC enable
-Wimplicit-function-declaration by default, except in a context where
-Werror is on by default, and that's where things broke and why I
backed that change in the end..

If you want a C analogy, the situation is not at all analogous to make
calling lint for you. The situation is analogous to make calling GCC
with flags decided by the author, vs calling gcc with flags that vary
depending on what the user uses for completely different purposes —
including all-important flags that decide the syntax, i.e. K&R C vs
C90 vs C99 vs C11 C++ vs GNU extensions on or off vs C++98 vs C++03 vs
C++11 vs Objective C vs Objective C++ vs Pascal vs FORTRAN77 vs
FORTRAN90, etc.

Who should specify say which flags should be used, including which
language each file is written in? Should it be the system author, or
the user? What does the author know about which dialect each file is
written in, anyway?

While we're at it, why not have the file extension decided by the
user? Maybe we should have the type of Lisp file not be "lisp" or
whatever the author believes it is, but whatever the
compiler::*compiler-default-type* variable says. And too bad if the
author, that idiot, thought it was "lisp", when the user, that genius,
knows it's "lsp". The user is obviously better suited than the author
at telling the names of the files actually present in his filesystem.

An even better idea: let the user decide the filenames and the order
in which he'll load them. That will make for a simpler build system!

Actually, maybe we should also let the user decide how to transform
the author's source files to executable code. Ain't nobody got time
for Lisp compilers.

In the end it's a matter of WHO specifies the settings for some
compilation: the system author or the user.

—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org
To make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.
                — Carl Sagan