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From: martin@kuling.UUCP (Erik Martin)
Newsgroups: net.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Against the Tide of Common LISP
Message-ID: <995@kuling.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 25-Jun-86 21:12:16 EDT
Article-I.D.: kuling.995
Posted: Wed Jun 25 21:12:16 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 28-Jun-86 09:42:52 EDT
References: <830@bu-cs.UUCP>
Reply-To: martin@kuling.UUCP (Per-Erik Martin)
Organization: Dep. of Computer Systems, Upsala University, Sweden
Lines: 39

In article <830@bu-cs.UUCP> bzs@bu-cs.UUCP writes:
>
>Where is the user environment anyhow? It's not there, every vendor
>gets to make it up and in so doing will add a zillion (+-3) functions.
>Will *this* be part of CL? No. Will programs 'accidently' use these
>vendor supplied functions to make things useable? Yes. Will your
>code run on other CLs? No.

Do you mean that this is a special property of CL? Foo! I've used
the same version of MacLisp on different machines and the user environments
can be totally different, depending of which features the local hackers
have included. Also there are different librarys which are supposed to exist,
programs just load them. This is a problem you never get around in any
interpreted, dynamic langauage.
Common Lisp is fairly well defined in environmental matters, especially, 
the I/O functions can not be better defined unless you make sertain 
assumptions about hardware and terminal capabilities.
Besides, will a Franzlisp program run in Interlisp? No. Will a Maclisp
program run in Franz'? Probably not. Will a CL program run in (another)
CL? Yes, if you don't use implementation dependent features not included in
the standard. It's up to you. (If you really *want* to loose so...)

>This could be the beginning of a long dark ages for LISP. Franz and
>Interlisp were/are far superior even if the compiler has to figure a
>few things out (what a waste of a human I suppose.) Others probably
>were/are also.

I think that, what You (and Jeffrey Jacobs) really mean is that CL does 
not look and behave like you are used to and therefore must be bad.
("I've hacked Lisp for ten years and know what a REAL Lisp looks like,
 so don't you come here with that new stuff!")
If people had thought that way the last twenty years we would still use
LISP 1.5 (the oldest version I've seen).


					PEM
-- 
Per-Erik Martin,  Computing Science Dep., Uppsala University, Sweden
UUCP: martin@kuling.UUCP  (...!{seismo,mcvax}!enea!kuling!martin)