[Ecls-list] Status of CVS

[Gabriel Dos Reis]

On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 11:36 AM, Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll
<jjgarcia at users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
> 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.

I think you have the right to complain -- after all, *you* do the work.
All I do is to try ECL on something and complains it does not work :-)
And as far as I can tell, all my requests have been given
considerations or implemented.

I see you complaining about GCC after you've tried it on something
it did not work right :-) We are all producer and users amd exchange
roles on regular basis

>
>  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.

Agreed in principle.  All I was saying is that this new behaviour
can be very useful and it has been for the case of Axiom derivatives
in porting -- and  as an implementor, you have the right to complain
about having to implement something nonstandard.

>
>
>  >  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?

As I said above, the doer has the right to vent frsutrations :-)

Anyway, let me repeat what I said in original mail: Excellent!

Best,

-- Gaby