RE: [Axiom-developer] axiom common lisp

[C Y]

I think the point should be made that Tim (the "root" Tim) is taking a
more measured approach - rather than just making the code work on ANSI
lisp implementations, he is going in and addressing/eliminating the
multitude of bizarre layers that have accumulated over the decades.  (I
think - feel free to correct me Tim :-).

This may not "get us to ANSI Lisp" as fast as making the smaller
changes would, but the result will be far more understandable, far
easier to work with, and far less fragile than the current state of
affairs.  From this standpoint, making the changes to get to ANSI lisp
now would just result in duplicate effort in the long run, and would be
of questionable benefit since it makes far more sense to test Axiom on
multiple lisp implementations after it has been rewritten in a cleaner
fashion.  Problems brought to light in the current codebase stand a
fair chance of being eliminated by the lisp cleanup/rewrite.

That said, if the change really is a fairly simple one and there is
sufficient interest to get it in place I would vote for it being put in
place in order to allow us to transition over to GCL's ANSI
environment.  This would be more for GCL's benefit than ours -
certainly an ANSI Axiom, even (or perhaps especially) with ANSI being
simply the support layer for layers of emulation, would be an excellent
stress test of GCL!

Tim, if patches were made available that would allow Axiom to
transition to ANSI GCL would there be any chance they could be merged
in with the latest release branch?  Or do we want to avoid dealing with
the problems that will surely crop up moving between Lisp
implementations until the proper rewrite is done?  

Cheers,
CY




                
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