[cells-devel] corman second thoughts

[Kenny Tilton]

It just occurred to me what the problem may have been that made me 
abandon the Corman and CLisp ports. The key Cells mechanism called 
"echoing" works via the generic function c-echo-slot-name. Two problems: 
the method combination is progn, and the dispatch requires EQL 
specialization.

The first question is whether those limitations still apply to either 
implementation. Perhaps newer versions have fixed these. If not..

The method combo can be dispensed with. It did make a rare edge case 
easier to manage and then struck me as more appropriate to the necessary 
semantics, but normal method combo could have been made to work without 
too much work. Indeed, you'll see the defgeneric for c-echo-slot-name is 
featured-out for clisp and corman.

As for the eql dispatch, that would require modifying def-c-echo to 
stash anonymous functions with gensym'ed names into a hash table...well, 
it would be ugly, and I think this is where I ran out of patience with 
corman and clisp.

hopefully they have mended their CLOS ways. if not, I think someone 
really determined to make the port should not have that much trouble. 
these are nicely localized little problems, and I would certainly help 
and accept the changes into Cells/Cello.

kenneth


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