Re: [Axiom-developer] Boot and other Lisps

[Gregory Vanuxem]

Hello Gaby,

Le mardi 13 mars 2007 à 02:04 -0500, Gabriel Dos Reis a écrit : 
> Howdy!
> 
>   As of revision 445, bootsys from src/boot in build-improvements
> can be built with GCL, SBCL, CLISP.  Just configure with the option
> 
>      --with-lisp=<your lisp command>
> 
> That was an opportunity to clean up src/boot/Makefile.pamphlet a bit.
> I merged boothdr.lisp, npextras.lisp and exports.lisp in a single
> file, initial-env.lisp, which I augmented with functions to interface
> with the build machinery.

I'm very happy of these modifications, this is great, thanks! I hope
works in this direction will be continued. On another direction I'm also
happy of works on the compiler and am reasonably impatient to see some
things.

A part from that, apparently, you forgot to commit the file
initial-env.lisp in the repository and I found a minor typo in btpile2
(v\documentclass line 1).

You have also added documentation here and there which is a yet another
good thing (I stop here my pseudo congratulations, this become
insane :-). In the version of Axiom that I uploaded I added the
Makefile.pamphlet from src/boot, which is the only documentation as far
as I know of the boot, more precisely Shoe, language.

I have a question about an issue in this language. You have probably
encountered a problem with the redefinition of the *package* variable,
at least with SBCL. From what I have read you're using directly (setq
*package* something), this prevents the addition of the *packages*
variable to the list of locally bound variable in the 'prog'. My
question is as follow, is it possible to declare a variable as special
without adding it to this list of variables ? Such that it can be used
normally i.e if you want to assign a new value you can use the :=
operator and, important thing, it's not bound to nil at the beginning of
the prog ?

If I remember correctly it's possible with variables that begin with a
dollar sign but in the case of Lisp special variable (generally of the
form *something*) I have not found how. During my small work on boot I
began to modify the boot language (fluid and local variables) and
stopped there mainly because I do not have a clear meaning of what I
really wanted to do, what to do with these Lisp special variables (do we
really want to manipulate these variables in boot) and, of course,
because you, Waldek and probably others are working in these areas and I
do not have the necessary knowledge to work on these issues (I always
postponed my "study" of the shoe/boot/spad compilers).
If this is not possible actually to do what I'm asking, maybe you (or
any others) have some thoughts about this (this is not restricted to
bootsys, in the interpreter some special variables are used too,
*standard-output* among others (though *standard-output* is relatively
important since setting it to nil break the compilation process under
SBCL).

Just curious,

Greg

> 
> I've not tempted to build src/interp yet -- and it is not going to be
> an easy party.
> 
> Building bootsys with SBCL and CLISP is amazingly fast, compared to
> building with GCL.
> 
> -- Gaby
> 
> 
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