[elephant-devel] Ignore both these messages

[Dan Knapp]

   Yep, I managed to accidentally resend the same exact email -
just ignore it.  Bah.

On Nov 24, 2004, at 9:19 PM, Dan Knapp wrote:

>   I thought a little praise for this project was in order.  I'm a 
> teacher by
> profession, and our school is doing report cards now.  And, like many
> schools, we want a system that keeps bits of text to be re-used in
> different places, as appropriate... it requires a database.
>
>   I spent about four days trying to put something together with MS
> Word's mail merge.  I got 90% of the way there, but the things I
> couldn't make work were important.   Each little thing I added
> broke something else, which then needed hours of debugging.
>
>   With the deadline bearing down, I took a chance and started again
> from scratch, using OpenMCL with Elephant, and generating TeX
> output.  It took just one night - about eight hours - to make the whole
> thing!  Then I was able to incrementally add features over the next
> couple days.
>
>   It was great being able to just treat database objects like any other
> object.  It lets you do incremental development in true Lisp style.
> Working with an SQL server allows something similar, but of course
> with Elephant one keeps all the generality of Lisp.  Elephant was also
> much easier to set up, and I can move the database from one
> machine to another easily, which turned out to be important.
>
>   I do wish the :recover option to (open-store) were documented
> somewhere - I needed it at one point, and didn't see it mentioned
> anywhere until I looked in the source.  But it worked perfectly once
> I did find it.  If you don't document your features, nobody gives you
> credit for them!
>
>   So, thanks!  Elephant was very useful, and I can think of a couple
> personal things I'm going to use it for in the near future.  Kudos.
>
> -- Dan Knapp 
>
-- Dan Knapp