init of mop and graphics

[Brian T Rice]

On Thu, 8 May 2003, Paul Dufresne wrote:

> Files in init.slate of MOP and graphics, don't begin by 'src/graphics' or
> 'src/mop'.
> Are you able to change directory before fileIn these, or is it just that
> they were never fileIn?

They were never filed in, or when we do file them in, we change them
ourselves or just perform each loading on our own. Those libraries also
don't work right now. There is a lot missing from the Slate run-time, such
as processes, dependency notification, error-handling, and graphics
access, which make running those libraries difficult.

Error-handling's absence in particular is a factor in our not having
expanded the libraries a lot recently, since a lot of situations call for
it (like the XML libraries which will often need to report XML syntax or
structure errors), and will require recoding later.

If someone feels like writing a CLX wrapper for Slate without the benefit
of threads or simple error-handling, be my guest, but it's a bit futile.

I've considered using the VT220 library as a graphics display backend to
the interface framework, but this also seems like a headache that won't
gain much.

I've /also/ considered (seriously) wrapping some sockets library in CL,
but generally this is not portable. CLisp supports them "out of the box",
so this may be a good enough reason to do it. If we did this, we would not
include it in the manual; it'd be there for testing whenever loaded via
clisp.

Observers of Slate should note that what's in the manual is a subset of
the full functionality provided; we can't afford to document interfaces we
intend to change or that only exist for bootstrapping. If you really want
to know what's there, go through slate.lisp looking for the
"define-method" and "define-object" entries. Most of them are pretty
clear.

Finally, the MOP in particular is speculative. It is totally pointless
except to document design ideas for post-bootstrap structuring.

-- 
Brian T. Rice
LOGOS Research and Development
http://tunes.org/~water/