RE: [Axiom-developer] Debugging Boot

[Bill Page]

Gaby,

On November 26, 2006 6:44 PM you wrote:

> 
> Don't be sorry.  Apparently, I made the incorrect assumption
> that Bill was more knowledgeable with the system than he thinks
> he is.  That exceedingly annoyed him.  Please ignore my message.
> 

I think you misunderstand. Both your message and Gregory's message
were very useful and should not be ignored. What annoyed me was
how poorly written they were as documentation for how to use boot.
It would have been better to simply point out that what I wrote as
two commands to compile Boot source code to Lisp code and then to
compile and load the Lisp code, can actually be written as one
simple command:

 )lisp (boot "src/interp/i-output2.boot")

The example of 

  )lisp (boottran::boot "src/interp/i-output2.boot")

in your original question, apparently concerning bootsys, was out
of context or perhaps you were not aware that 'boottran' is not
the package name used in AXIOMsys. In AXIOMsys the name of this
function is 'boot::boot'. 'boot' is the default package, so we can
call the function by just the name 'boot'.

The state of the documentation about Boot and how to use it is so
poor that I think we need to do everything we can to improve it.
Writing clear emails containing as much information as possible is
one way to help do this. Eventually the content might be collected
in a more usable format on the web or in a Boot Users Guide.

My level of frustration was heightened by Martin Rubey's recent
request for a "recipe" for how to debug code written in Boot and
which started this thread, since we still have no specific
documentation to which I could point even though this is quite
fundamental to Axiom debugging and development.

Regards,
Bill Page.