[closer-devel] starting work on a port to Corman Lisp

[Jack Unrue]

On 7/21/06, Pascal Costanza <pc at p-cos.net> wrote:
> Hi everybody,

Hi Pascal!

> In the recent days, I have taken a look at how these things could be
> broken up into digestible chunks. However, I am afraid that it
> doesn't make a lot of sense. The incompatibilities across CL
> implementations are rather random, and the whole picture looks more
> like Swiss Cheese [1] to me than anything you could reasonably
> explain. So this looks like a lot of work without any real benefit.

Understood.

> (A nice benefit would have been if you could have stated requirements
> what features you need for a particular metaprogram, and this would
> have yielded the Common Lisp implementations that you could use.
> Unfortunately, things aren't by far that simple...)
>
> The obvious separation of introspection and intercession is, well,
> obvious. So making it more formal doesn't buy us a lot either, I think.
>
> Since I think I can spend my time on issues that will turn out more
> useful for CLOS MOP users, I will drop this idea.

Your research into the idea is much appreciated and I think
time well spent!

> Is there still interest to include support for Corman Lisp? I think
> we could get some (very limited) support into Closer to MOP, similar
> to the one we currently have for ECL. I would have to change the
> handling of packages in MOP Feature Tests, and then we could see how
> to proceed from there. Please let me know if you're interested...

I'm still interested. I strongly suspect that Corman's CLOS implementation
will not deviate radically in 2.6 from how it's implemented in 2.51, but
Roger did reply to my query about DELETE-PACKAGE saying that they
would try to get that done.

Incidentally, my MOP usage has increased slightly compared to when
this discussion started, such that I now make use of CLASS-PROTOTYPE
in Graphic-Forms. I'm reasonably sure that my MOP needs have stabilized
now.

-- 
Jack Unrue