Position & proposal

[Paul Prescod]

>   The difference is that when I mess with things, I'm willing accept
> the possibility that I'll break things along the way. I don't expect
> the system to "magicly" break when I'm just using it. Say you're trying
> out some new ideas for the POS but I just using it. I use your new
> version to save my irreplacable data. (It's always worked in the
> past.) But you have a subtle bug in your new version that you are
> trying to debug. I'm hosed because you can't try out your new version
> without forcing me to use it for production work. 

"It hurts when I do that." "Then don't do that." You can have the option of
changing to a beta POS at runtime on a heavily used multiuser machine without
being stupid enough to do so. I don't see any hard problems there. What if I'm
using LispOS as a web server for the olympic scores and I swap in buggy web 
server software as I'm getting 100,000 hits? Same problem. Same solution. 
Think before you act.

 Paul Prescod