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

[Gary King]

I think that having two or more reasonable conformance "levels" would  
make sense. I also think that breaking MOP support into introspection  
and semantics (implementation altering) makes sense. I don't know  
much of anything about the consistency of MOP implementations but it  
work to have something like (warning, ASCII art ahead):

MOP Support
|
+-------------------- introspection
|                                |
|                               +-------------------- level 1
|                               +-------------------- level 2
|
+-------------------- implementation
                                  |
                                 +-------------------- level 1
                                 +-------------------- level 2

Where the levels lie will depend on how the MOP implementations carve  
"nature at its joints". That Plato, he had such a way with words.  
<smile>

> Because of my own work with the CLOS MOP, I typically think of the  
> more advanced features of the CLOS MOP. But I start to get the  
> impression that people find Closer to MOP useful for the very basic  
> features - and that makes a lot of sense, of course. Maybe I should  
> restructure the library to make it easier to distinguish the base  
> features for which we can have at least some guarantee that all  
> covered CLOS implementations support them, and the other more  
> advanced ones.
>
> For example, the pure introspective features are covered very well  
> almost everywhere. It's only the semantics-changing features  
> especially in the generic function invocation protocol that are  
> problematic across CLOS implementations - but that's also the part  
> where there actually seems to be very little demand.


-- 
Gary Warren King
metabang.com
http://www.metabang.com/
(413) 210 7511
gwking on #lisp (occasionally)