CLISP developers attitude. Was: [cl-typesetting-devel] CLISP support

[Klaus Weidner]

On Mon, Apr 26, 2004 at 06:48:28PM +0200, Marc Battyani wrote:
> Ok, I'm rather upset but look at this:

I hadn't had a chance until recently to look at the discussion...

> "Sam Steingold" <sds at gnu.org>
> > I would prefer that this usage just be banned, via an ANSI action.
> 
> And this one is even worse:
> "Sam Steingold" <sds at gnu.org>
> > The interesting thing is just starting.
> > IIUC, Paul's test suite uncovered some bugs in this MIT LOOP (which,
> > again IIUC, was something like _a_ reference implementation for the
> > standard - not _THE_ reference implementation, of course).
> > This means that some people who are using this implementation will be
> > fixing it.  Incompatibly.  Introducing different new bugs.  Cool!
> 
> He is happy to see that it will be the mess!

My interpretation of what Sam said is apparently very different from
yours - I'm certain that the "Cool!" was meant ironically. 

If the MIT LOOP is indeed being changed in ways that make it incompatible
with older versions of itself, there would be no point in attempting to
have CLISP emulate its behavior. The only sane conclusion is that
compatible code can't depend on anything regarding iteration variables in
a FINALLY clause.

The change CLISP is making will *not* gratuitously change the loop
semantics for the next version, they are adding a compatibility note and
warning, which would have saved me a lot of grief this weekend by directly
pointing out the problem. The current cl-typesetting code would not need
to be changed for their next version after all.

FYI, I just tested the CL extensions in Emacs, and its non-MIT loop
implementation also happens to agree with CLISP. So they are not the only
ones who do things that way.

-Klaus