Testing the waters.

[Adam Alpern]

> 	Yay, this is what I've been waiting for. I'm in favour of
> scheme as a base. My hunch is that common lisp has altogether too much
> historical baggage to make it useful in a new clean efficient OS. I
> 
> ( note that all the opinions presented here are not based on any
> particular aesthetic or design priniciple (except my views on CLOS)
> but rather from the point of view of a programmer who'd dearly love to
> write a lot of applications in LISP again )
> 
> I'm very strongly AGAINST using Scheme as a base - a major point is
> the lack of standardization, the lack of a module system, no packages,
> no object system, no macros - I could go on for a very long time.
> 
> I would notwant a LispOS that did not have a) Macros, or B) CLOS.  I
> shouldn't have to preach about the joys of CLOS to anyone on this
> list, or how useful it would be for high-level OS services.
> 
> Now, mind you, I think a SchemeOS would be cool, but it would be a
> SchemeOS, not a LispOS.  I want CL in all its glory. It doesn't have
> to be a monster though -  I think one of the mistakes that the ANSI-CL
> committe made was in not structuring the standard as a small core
> language plus libraries. I think it should be possible to implement CL
> as small-ish core plus optional libraries. 
> 
> But more importantly, I want CLOS - every object system add-on for
> Scheme that I've used had single-inheritance, no MOP, no method
> combination.  I want mulitple inheritance, multiple dispatch, method
> combination, and a full MOP.
> 
> 
> wouldn't worry about the followup post that questions the lack of
> scheme standard libraries. If we were to wait for scheme standard
> *anythings* to go through the language lawyer mill before acting we'd
> be waiting for the next few centuries before we saw the extensions
> that will no doubt be necessary for an entire "scheme machine".
> 
> And what do you propose to do about it? The lack of standard libraries
> IS something to worry about. There are numerous, incompatible
> extensions to scheme for everything that CL has standardized. How do
> we pick one if we go with Scheme? Yada yada yada....
> 
> Ultimately, I'd rather see a system with support for whatever language
> you want to use, featuring the ability to efficiently run any
> LISP-like language (through some language-neutral VM or whatever) and
> interoperability with everything else via CORBA.
> 
> Adam
> 
>