On 2/16/11 12:07 , Pascal J. Bourguignon wrote: […]
Once compiled, the lisp code is provided as a .class file.
That's incorrect. It is provided as a distinct .abcl file for each .lisp file, which is a zip containing a text file (generated from the top-level forms in the .lisp file) + a .cls file for each function (top-level or non-inlined local) in the .lisp file. .cls files are in JVM class file format, but they're not loadable as-is because they don't obey the JVM naming conventions (they ought to be ending in .class and placed in a org/armedbear/lisp/ directory). What you *can* do is package .abcl files in a .jar file and use ASDF to load them with a single function call.
To use more CL-like language: a file "test.lisp" has a FASL "test.abcl". Our FASL is a zip of the initialization code ('%%%._'), the classes our bytecode compiler emits ('%%%-nnn.cls') for each top-level form in the corresponding ('%%%.lisp') source file. The contents of the bootstraip ('%%%._') are executed when this FASL is (re)loaded.