Re: [Axiom-developer] Re: learning Lisp

[root]

> Of course but why doesn't $dalymode allow the same short-cut
> for )lisp inside ')read'?

because $dalymode only works from the input command prompt and not
from files. it's not architected, it's just a hack. if we think this
is useful then it should be architected but it's only there because,
as a developer, i spend almost all my time hacking the lisp code,
tracing, rewriting, and redefining functions and then testing them at
the axiom level. personally i don't think there is a general need for
such features and therefore it is just for maintenance workers. just
like the phone line repairman can make phone calls from the top of the
phone pole and pretend it comes from your house so he doesn't have to
climb down and use your phone for testing.

there is no need to read lisp code from files as i always work
in emacs and the code is in the other buffer. thus i would never
have known that it won't work from files. it's like discovering
that your answering machine won't work at the top of the phone pole.

there are several maintenance tools in axiom. see the file
src/interp/monitor.lisp.pamphlet which is a general purpose tool for
monitoring lisp functions. it knows how to monitor algebra function
calls. i use it to collect and analyze the performance of interpreter
and algebra code but it assumes you know what an NRLIB is, why
interp.exposed exists, etc. it also assumes you know how algebra
name-mangling works since it reports algebra statistics in their
underlying lisp name forms. and since i know that it hacks the :cond
param on trace i can make it do much more than statistical counts.
unlike the other lisp code i wrote this one is actually documented.

but there is so much more to document before we get to the low
level maintenance code.

t