Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!sun-barr!apple!well!nagle
From: nagle@well.UUCP (John Nagle)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Common Lisp subsets - are there any?
Message-ID: <12848@well.UUCP>
Date: 24 Jul 89 15:19:00 GMT
References: <30255@cornell.UUCP> <398@odi.ODI.COM> <2234@wasatch.utah.edu>
Reply-To: nagle@well.UUCP (John Nagle)
Lines: 14


     A Common Lisp system that simply implements "Common Lisp, the Language"
isn't all that big.  Look at KCL.  Common Lisp systems become unwieldy as
people throw in an editor, an inspector, a debugger, a window manager, and
put them all in the same address and name space as the user's program,
along with the compiler.  Having done so, they then find that switching
from one tool to another leaves vast amounts of garbage around, so 
garbage collection becomes slow.  Then they have to make garbage
collection much more complicated so that tool-switching isn't so painful.
Then they find that the new garbage-collection strategy has to be
integrated with the virtual memory system to prevent thrashing.
Eventually it can all be made to work, but was it worth it?

     					John Nagle