[Ecls-list] Developer's manual, C interface

[Juan Jose Garcia Ripoll]

Dear lispers,

I am working on a separate manual for people who want to use ECLS as embedded 
language or who want to write C extensions to the ECLS environment. The first 
pages have been both uploaded to the web page and submitted to CVS.

The manual, right now, covers the inner representation of lisp objects in 
general, plus sections about fixnums, characters, arrays and strings. The 
docs somehow resemble my idea of what the interface to C should look like.

You may notice some changes in the names of macros, types and functions with 
respect to ECoLisp and to previous versions of ECLS. I would like to hear 
your opinion about this.

I first thought about creating a separate namespace for ecls by prepending 
every function with the "cl_" prefix. Right now I feel the ecls library is 
too large for this to be worth and I am considering to minimize the changes.

I also thought about creating macros and functions for hiding the details 
about the inner representation of nonimmediate objects. I now feel it is not 
worth creating a hundred of these functions, and that having a cl_object 
which is a pointer to a union is a good thing.

Just my 0.02$. If I do not receive enough feedback, I will proceed with the 
development on my own, but I feel it would be better to have some 
constructive discussion in this community (whose size I still ignore).

TIA

	Juanjo

-- 
http://www.arrakis.es/~worm