Testing the waters.

[Christopher J. Vogt]

At 6:48 PM -0500 5/8/97, Chris Bitmead uid(x22068) wrote:
>>re. CL vs. Scheme
>>
>>There is a lot to be said for standardization, and in part, that is the
>>value of CL over Scheme or any other Lisp.  CL has all these wonderful
>>features built-in, and standardized.
>>
>>I have programs written in CL, and they will port with very minimal
>>problems to other CL implementations.  If I develop on a CL implementation,
>>I can port to others.  In Scheme with this library added, and that
>>non-standard feature added, you don't get portability.  Not only do *I*
>>want portability, but I believe that there are many others that want it as
>>well.
>
>You won't get portability from LispOS to other versions of CL in any
>case, because you won't have the POS ported to the other version of
>CL. And POSes are always very tightly integrated with the virtual
>machine and garbage collector, and application code.

You and I obviously have different applications/needs for CL.

I have ported code I wrote on LispMs to other Lisp environments, and the
code was not that difficult to port.  The majority of programs that *I*
would write, don't require a LispM to run.  I want a LispM because it
supports my development, makes me more productive etc.  This is why I harp
on functionality and portability.  The end result may or may not run on a
LispM, and I don't want to be tethered to one.  So, I put platform specific
code into one file (or multiple files) seperate from the rest of the code.
I do the same with UI code, since UI code tends not to be portable.  For
the code I write, platform specific code and UI code make up a small
fraction (~1%) of my total code base.  Further, the time to develop my
application is more than 100x the time it takes to develop the UI and muck
around in the platform specific code.

>
>You may get your existing CL lisp programs working on LispOS, but they
>won't do things the LispOS way, so they fall into the general category
>of how to get legacy applications working on LispOS.

I don't understand this at all.  What is the LispOS way?  How does it
prohibit my application from *working* on other platforms?  My view of
LispOS is essentially a LispM with some updated bells and whistles.  Maybe
your view is differnet and that is why we are talking past each other.


Christopher (Chris) J. Vogt
mailto:vogt@novia.net
Omaha, NE
http://www.novia.net/~vogt/