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

[Jack Unrue]

On 6/23/06, Pascal Costanza <pc at p-cos.net> wrote:
>
> 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.)

OK.

> 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. ;)

Thanks for the info, I appreciate it. I was going to try porting Closer
so that I could then work on porting my Graphic-Forms library to the
new release of Corman.

I use Closer in my code to define subclasses of an event handler
base class and implement one or more methods for associated
generic functions, on behalf of application code. So, in addition
to possibly porting PCL (which I realize is potentially a major project
not to be lightly taken on :-), another alternative is to change my
code such that I don't use Closer any more -- but this means
disrupting a feature that is working just fine on other Lisps.

As a result, I'm probably going to prioritize Corman Lisp lower
again and work on something else.

> 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?)

To get an "official" statement, I've posted a note to one of Corman's
forums asking about this and will followup here with a link to any reply.
But comments in the clos.lisp source file in the beta I have indicates
that it is still based on Closette.

-- 
Jack Unrue