[Ecls-list] Status of CVS

[Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll]

On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 6:13 PM, Gabriel Dos Reis
<gdr at integrable-solutions.net> wrote:
>  I had promoted ECL for Axiom -- see Waldek's work/reports -- but
>  frankly, at time I had been amazed by the relative intolerance of
>  some Lisp translator writers.

I only hope that you do not take my comments as intolerance. I may
complain, and have the right to do so, and have expressed my opinions
and founded them. That has not interfered with trying to keep people
happy and the record so far is that things get used the way people
request -- and if ECL does not improve more along the lines of
usability it is simply because there are no requests.

See, what I meant to say about SBCL's behavior is simply that there
are "features" around that work and people get used to them and then
they begin to believe that this is part of the language, and move to
some other implementation and hey, it must be broken because it does
not do things the way I expect. I am talking about type checks, or
about the interpretation of OPTIMIZE declarations, or that funny thing
with the order of the LOOP statements.

>  What programmers do may be annoying
>  but sometimes, we compiler writers tend to forget how
>  programmers get `to do' what they are doing -- in particular, they
>  may have inherited codes they did not author in the first place.

Sure, I perfectly understand this.

>  I'm sure you know this, but a good compiler is not just one that
>  follows the letter of the standard;
>  a good compiler is one that assists in getting the *job done*.  It is most
>  annoying when compiler writers (and I happen to occasionally commit
>  that sin as GCC contributor) decide to moralize on what programmers do
>  -- they can  quickly alienate otherwise committed supporters.

But why am I not even allowed to express my thoughts? Come, has _this_
feature been implemented or not?

Juanjo

-- 
Facultad de Fisicas, Universidad Complutense,
Ciudad Universitaria s/n Madrid 28040 (Spain)
http://juanjose.garciaripoll.googlepages.com