alisp

Brian Rice water@tscnet.com
Tue, 12 Oct 1999 15:28:02 -0700


At 04:04 PM 10/11/99 -0200, you wrote:
>Brian Rice wrote:
>
>> 
>> I'd have to agree with Jecel here.  It seems against the grain of designing
>> reflective systems to give them more hoops to jump through to make
>> reflection workable.  This is certainly the case when you decide to
>> implement more features than are absolutely necessary, or include any
>> services that are not as simple to describe as possible for the core
>> language.  You'll just be adding unneeded complexity in the long run, IMHO.
>> 
>> To provide contrast, I am developing an interface to my Arrow prototype
>> from a Lisp interpreter written in Smalltalk.  Most of the design changes
>> involve simplifying the features of the parser, so that the more
>> complicated translation issues can be made by using the interpreter itself.
>>  But then, most of the issues involve conceptual shifts that programmers
>> haven't before addressed.  The point is that it seems to be a much simpler
>> feat to implement features within the reflective framework than to develop
>> the framework to support the feature set.
>> 
>>         Brian
>
>Definitely, I agree with you. I expressed myself poorly in the original
>message; I intend to make the core as simple as possible, and implement
>all additional functionality within the framework already provided by
>the interpreter. By 'features', I really meant changes in the language
>core's design - with the ultimate goal of making it fully reflective.
>
>Anyway, I'll soon be sending out some design ideas I've had for the
>alisp implementation. Criticism is expected and required, as always :)
>
>Rafael Kaufmann

looking forward to it :)

Brian