Testing the waters.

[Adam Alpern]

Chris Bitmead:
;; 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.

I sure hope you don't apply that reasoning to your own applications -
ever heard of modular design? You don't need a degree in software
engineering to separate out platform-dependent code from
platform-independent code. If LispOS is based on CL, application level
code should be VERY portable between LispOS and other CLs. Only the
levels that interface with the OS will be non-portable.  This is the
same deal in ANY programming environment. I write applications right
now that have one common source base that will compile on Solaris,
HP-UX, AIX, Windows NT, and Linux, and a small set of
platform-dependent code.

Chris Bitmead:
;; 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.

The same reasoning above applies here too. It's insane to create a
Lisp-based OS and then lump all existing LISP programs in the legacy
bin. Can you see that?


-Adam