[fetter-devel] Fetter Update #1

[Kenny Tilton]

Rayiner Hashem wrote:

>Hello everyone. I'm just e-mailing to update everyone on the status of
>fetter. The design document took me a little bit longer than I
>expected. In any case, I've attached a PDF of the document to this
>e-mail, and I welcome any commentary on the contents.
>
The first impression is that it is well thought out.

A minor quibble: you say defbinding is analogous to defpackage, but do 
not make explicit the obvious, viz, that the first argument to 
defbinding becomes the package name. I mean, it is totally obvious, but 
you might want to make it explicit.

Now I could answer this myself, but I have somehow managed to lose the 
original fetter proposal: is support for VC++ planned? i think I recall 
that it was, but it's hazy. So as an aside, please re-send the original 
proposal to me. Or maybe put it up on the FTP location for your fetter 
project on cl.net and link to it from the Web page for fetter. You might 
also put this dsign PDF up there and link to it. Because....

... I think greater community involvement/feedback in these vital 
projects might help. You seem to have a pretty clear idea where you are 
going and, hey, it's Lisp, it is easy to revise as new or better ideas 
come along, but there are some smart Lisp people out there who might 
have some good ideas. So I am thinking an announcement posted a couple 
of places inviting people to track fetter (and all the Lisp NYC 
projects) might be a good idea. if the discussion itself stays on the 
fetter mailing list, I think we can avoid the nonsense i would expect 
from a discussion on c.l.l itself.

> Specifically,
>I'm interested in ideas about how to make the input file syntax more
>powerful and useful, and ideas about integration of C/C++ libraries
>into Lisp code.
>

Heh, I just wait for things to go wrong or come up short and then 
refactor. :)

Do you have a C++ library in mind as a guinea pig? Something I thought 
would be useful is to create a test C++ library which exercised all the 
capabilities of fetter and hello-c. This would serve as regression test 
and even documentation, since folks suing fetter to get to c++ would be 
able to see what Lisp was used to get to each C++ component, data 
structure or function. But that could be a big job. Just a thought.

-- 
Kenny

Why Lisp? http://lisp.tech.coop/RtL%20Highlight%20Film

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