[cl-typesetting-devel] CLISP support

[Klaus Weidner]

On Tue, Apr 27, 2004 at 09:52:56AM +0400, Dmitri Ivanov wrote:
> I respect Klaus's goal of  platform independency, but could it be achieved
> with less effort? After the great battle against LOOP, we all have found out
> too many details about how to use it properly, to code cautiously, and to
> conditionalize implementations differences.s

I don't like conditionalizations unless they're unavoidable, and even
then they should if at all possible be hidden in a separate file that
provides a system-independent wrapper.

> Do you suggest throwing out all the knowledge?! I propose gather it
> into cl-typesetting-devel Style Guide :-)

The LOOP chapter of the Style Guide could be quite short - don't use
iteration variables in the FINALLY section ;-)

The implementations seem to agree on everything other than that.

> Increasing the total size of source code without real necessity is also not
> good IMHO. Adding ITERATE would blow up the project, let alone rewriting.
> Personally, I hate learning new things when the old work almost fine:-)

ITERATE has a couple of very nice features that LOOP doesn't have, for
example better nested loops - you can COLLECT data into a variable of the
surrounding loop from an inner loop. Also, it's easily extensible.

And the rewriting would be fairly straightforward, since the semantics
are essentially equivalent to LOOP. It's not nearly as big a change as
SERIES would be.

It's Marc's decision - I can live with either one. I'd suggest reducing
the complexity of loops of either kind if at all possible, similar in
spirit to the v-split change I made.

-Klaus