[Bese-devel] darcs patch: Add :fiveam to *features*

[Alan Shields]

On Fri, Aug 12, 2005 at 04:34:08PM +0200, Marco Baringer wrote:
> Alan Shields <Alan-Shields at omrf.ouhsc.edu> writes:
> 
> > Thu Aug 11 16:20:32 CDT 2005  Alan Shields <Alan-Shields at omrf.ouhsc.edu>
> >   * Add :fiveam to *features*
> >   I've found that I prefer to add testing code in my other code, but I dislike
> >   adding :fiveam to my package requirements list.
> 
> i am hesitant to modify *features*, it's not really supposed to be
> used for this (afaict).

Several packages modify *features* (such as CL-PPCRE, and
SPLIT-SEQUENCE) to include their package name. ASDF as well.

While CLTL specifies that *features* contains tokens "provided by the
implementation", CLHS specifies that the tokens "correspond to some
aspect of the implementation or environment." This difference would seem
to be deliberate.

I am no common lisp expert, but it would seem to me that *features*
exists to solve exactly the problem that we're facing here: conditional
inclusion of code based on the environment in which the code is loaded.

As you say yourself further in the thread: the #. solution leads to
uglyness.

Alan