[Axiom-developer] Re: Literate ASDF

[C Y]

--- address@hidden wrote:

> Literate supporting ASDF loads.... what a truly awesome idea.
> 
> That would mean that the literate idea could be spread to the
> rest of the lisp community. Then literate files could be remotely
> hosted ASDF files and drag-and-drop becomes so much easier.

Actually, I think the Lisp community as a whole (or at least #lisp) is
rather skeptical that literate programming is a good match to
traditional lisp programming styles.  Still, that's the beauty of open
source - there's nothing stopping us from converting existing lisp code
to literate lisp code. :-)
 
> That idea collapses whole layers of complexity out of the build
> tower.
> The build would amount to ASDF-loading the interpreter, the compiler,
> and the algebra. Very, very sweet.
> 
> Even if we can't make it work I'm impressed with the idea.

Thanks - I think it's come up briefly in the past but the whole web
system in lisp issue had to come first.  (Or minimally a way to invoke
noweb from lisp that asdf could use, and since we wanted a faster
tangle operation anyway cl-web seemed the logical starting point.)

The next step looks like it will have to be converting ASDF into a
literate program - I need to make sure I understand it well enough to
map pamphlet file concepts to it :-/.  So far it LOOKS like making a
subclass of source-file for pamphlets, making a second for cl-pamphlet,
 a method for source-file-type, a perform method (most of the hard
work), and some modifications to the component parser to handle the
chunk option.  There are probably a couple of additional changes that
will be needed, and the ins and outs of the input and output file
handling and error handling I'm not sure about yet.

I rather doubt the asdf devs would accept a pamphlet file, so my plan
at the moment is to include the literate asdf in Axiom in case it can
be of help to others.  We can track the latest changes and document
them as they occur.  Whether it should diverge much is another question
(there are apparently a few suggestions for improvements floating
around out there) but my preference would be to make any additional
changes as extensions.  asdf-literate.lisp.pamphlet would extend the
functionality in asdf.  We could have the bootstrap lisp script check
for asdf in the target lisp system, and load the one in Axiom if a
system asdf can't be loaded.  I wish lisp vendors would build with asdf
in the default image always, which would reduce the bootstrap script to
setting up the asdf search path and invoking asdf on the axiom system,
but at this time I'm not sure they do.

Anyway, I'll start in on asdf and see how that goes.

Cheers,
CY


       
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