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

[Pascal Costanza]

On 23 Jun 2006, at 02:33, Jack Unrue wrote:

> I'm interested in getting Closer to MOP running on Corman Lisp (the  
> next
> release of which is currently in beta). As a first step towards a  
> port, I've
> started working through the MOP feature tests.
>
> I have one general question to start with -- are patches that provide
> workarounds for ANSI compliance problems acceptable? The first one
> I've encountered is that in CCL, delete-package simply signals an  
> error
> with a "not implemented" string argument. I've sent feedback
> to the vendor on this. In the meantime, the simplest workaround is a
> hack (temporary packages would not get cleaned up), and so I'm  
> wondering
> if a patch that disables the call to delete-package for CCL only be  
> acceptable?

Fortunately, delete-package is only used in the test suite to provide  
a clean room for each test case. The simplest workaround I can think  
of is to provide a new package for each test case. (Currently, they  
all run in the same package, but between each run, that package is  
deleted and recreated again.)

> Just trying to get a sense for how far it's reasonable to go in  
> getting this
> port working vs. the understandable desire to keep your code sane.  
> Thanks
> in advance for your thoughts.

Before putting too much work into this, it would make more sense to  
first check whether a port of Closer to MOP to Corman Lisp is  
actually feasible. The last time I have checked, Corman Lisp's CLOS  
implementation was largely incompatible with the CLOS MOP spec. They  
have based their implementation on Closette, as provided in the AMOP  
book, and tweaked it to make it more ANSI-compliant. However,  
Closette is compatible with the CLOS MOP only in very few areas.  
Closer to MOP only provides fixes for CLOS implementations that  
attempt to be already somewhat close to the CLOS MOP specification.  
An attempt to fix an implementation that deviates too much doesn't  
make a lot of sense, because this would largely mean to more or less  
implement it from scratch. In that case, one could rather start to  
think about porting PCL. ;)

So the interesting question is this: Has Corman Lisp considerably  
changed their CLOS implementation to be more CLOS-MOP-compliant? (Do  
you have a link/pointer available where I could check this?)


Pascal

-- 
Pascal Costanza, mailto:pc at p-cos.net, http://p-cos.net
Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Programming Technology Lab
Pleinlaan 2, B-1050 Brussel, Belgium