[slime-devel] Re: [Ilisp-devel] SLIME

[Helmut Eller]

Bill Clementson <bill_clementson at yahoo.com> writes:

> Thanks for the clarification. Incidentally, what was
> the rationale for using inferior lisp mode instead of
> ilisp to "boot-strap" development? ILISP has some of
> the same "negatives" as ILM (since both were built on
> comint mode) however it has a lot more functionality
> than ILM. It seems like (at least to me) it would have
> made more sense creating SLIME extensions on top of
> ILISP rather than ILM since there is so much more
> functionality in ILISP than there is in ILM. Even if
> the eventual goal is to replace all the functionality
> that is provided by ILM/ILISP, ILISP would provide
> more "short-term" benefits for the SLIME CL developer
> than ILM would.

I think the reason is that Eric Marsden, the author of SLIME's initial
version (at that time called SLIM) uses inf-lisp and not ILISP.  I
don't know what Luke used before SLIME, but I too used inf-lisp.

SLIME is now good enough for developing SLIME and at this stage it
simpler to add any missing functionality to SLIME itself than to make
it work with ILISP.  The advantage of inf-lisp over ILISP is that
inf-lisp is simpler and more robust.  Since we use inf-lisp primarily
as fallback when everything else fails, inf-lisp seems to be
preferable.

Helmut.