Actually now LOAD-ASD controls syntax, sets the readtable, controls the pretty-printer, sets up a cache, and a handler. And who knows what it will do tomorrow?
For the record, I'm not a fan. I would prefer that asd files were normal lisp. But they aren't, so I don't think we should lie about it, and I don't want to field alleged bug reports that arise because someone thought they were, when they are not.
I understand Stelian's point, but I still regret our making DEFSYSTEM look like normal code when it no longer is. In retrospect, I think we jumped the shark way back in the day when we gave up making programmers choose their own packages for the asd files. Making a package, and then instituting ASDF-USER was the top of the slippery slope.
But we're down the slope now, so I propose to at least warn programmers when they're doing something we have defined as wrong.
We could make this a continuable error as a concession to people who know that they want to evaluate these forms outside LOAD-ASD, but that's as far as I'm prepared to go.
Sent from my iPhone
On Sep 22, 2016, at 15:18, Eric Timmons etimmons@mit.edu wrote:
On Thu, Sep 22, 2016 at 3:04 PM, Robert Goldman rpgoldman@sift.net wrote: It would be trivial to bind a special variable around the body of LOAD-ASD, and put something in DEFSYSTEM that will raise an INTELLIGIBLE error if that variable is not so bound
(error "Do not load an ASDF system definition outside of ASDF:LOAD-ASD")
As I understand it, the issue isn't really with the DEFSYSTEM form itself. Instead, the issue is with all the *other* code that could be in the .asd file as the manual states that symbols from CL, ASDF, and UIOP will all be available inside an .asd file without an IN-PACKAGE form.
EVAL'ing a DEFSYSTEM form seems like a totally reasonable thing to do outside the context that LOAD-ASD sets up. And actually, ASDF itself does EVAL DEFSYSTEM forms, in package-inferred-system.lisp at the very least.
-Eric