[Ecls-list] Is ECL really ANSI compatible ?

[Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll]

On Fri, Sep 28, 2012 at 2:13 AM, z_axis <z_axis at 163.com> wrote:

> The ECL created stumpwm executable is smallest compared with SBCL, CCL and
> CLISP.  However, only the ECL executable doesnot work.
> I really want to know what the reason is.
>

Stumpwm did work with ECL not so long ago. Why it got rotten and no longer
works? The reason is that stumpwm relies on third party libraries and not
all of them care to support all implementations, plus not all developers
use the same Common Lisp implementations. Even among lisp implementations,
not all of them are equally ANSI compliant: for instance SBCL allows LOOP
with wrong syntax, which has made a lot of people write code that does not
work in ECL.

Another important source of trouble is that stumpwm relies on the CLX
graphics library to talk to the Xwindows server. While CLX is maintained as
a separate library, this is known to lag behind ECL in the sense that I
have repeatedly submitted patches and they have not been acknowledged or
integrated. For this reason why ECL ships its own copy of CLX but, for some
other strange reason, quicklisp insists on loading the other CLX.

This is a list of all packages installed by quicklisp when you demand to
use stumpwm

[package xlib]....................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
[package glx].....................................
[package gl]......................................
[package dpms]....................................
[package xtest]...................................
[package xlib.xinerama]...........................
[package xclclock]................................
[package clipboard]...............................
[package demos]...................................
[package gl-test].................................
[package xmandel].................................
[package cl-ppcre]................................
[package stumpwm].................................
[package stumpwm-user]............................

Which one is the offender, is something beyond my knowledge.

Note that I do not claim that this cannot be fixed (it has been fixed in
the past and can be fixed now, with time), but I want you to understand
that there are many sources of non-portability around.

It also creates a nasty landscape of expectations where Common Lisp
implementation maintainers have to chase software developers around to see
why their software breaks with their implementation, something for which
one does not always have the time -- Efforts like Anton's test library help
a lot here.

Juanjo

-- 
Instituto de Física Fundamental, CSIC
c/ Serrano, 113b, Madrid 28006 (Spain)
http://juanjose.garciaripoll.googlepages.com
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