Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!pyrnj!pyrdc!uunet!mcvax!ukc!dcl-cs!simon
From: simon@comp.lancs.ac.uk (Simon Brooke)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Protection of core lisp fns (was: Re: Question about eval)
Summary: WHAT! You cant do that!
Message-ID: <589@dcl-csvax.comp.lancs.ac.uk>
Date: 17 Oct 88 11:19:22 GMT
References: <13733@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu> <20700006@iuvax> <29266@think.UUCP>
Reply-To: simon@comp.lancs.ac.uk (Simon Brooke)
Organization: Department of Computing at Lancaster University, UK.
Lines: 27

In article <29266@think.UUCP> barmar@kulla.think.com.UUCP (Barry Margolin) writes:
>In article <20700006@iuvax> dyb@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu writes:
>>I think Dan wants to know if he can reliably redefine eval so that his own
>>eval is used by the top-level read-eval-print loop.
>
>One of the proposals before X3J13 (the ANSI Common Lisp committee),
>which I expect will be passed in a couple of months, specifies that
>the effects of redefining any functions in the LISP package (i.e. any
>function specified by the language standard) are undefined (it "is an
>error", to use CLtL terminology).  So, I wouldn't write any code that
>does this at the moment.
>
I'd like to say 'What! you can't do that'; but of course you can. However you
have a *responsibility* not to do that. By setting yourselves up as the ANSI
CL Committee, you are effectively hegemonising your view of LISP, and imposing
it on the rest of the LISP community. This is acceptable only if the language
you produce is at least as expressive as the language(s) you are forcing us to
abandon. And if we aren't allowed to redefine the way the top-level read - eval
- print loop works, then the language certainly isn't as expressive: there is
a large category of things it can't express.

** Simon Brooke *********************************************************
*  e-mail : simon@uk.ac.lancs.comp                                      * 
*  surface: Dept of Computing, University of Lancaster,  LA 1 4 YW, UK. *
*                                                                       *
*  Thought for today: isn't it time you learned the Language            * 
********************* International Superieur de Programmation? *********