Please don't take this personal, but: Pessimism is infectious. It would be better if you would keep your pessimism for yourself. There is some amount of good enthusiasm still in this community, and it needs to be encouraged further, not discouraged!

If there is enough interest and enthusiasm, then things do move. I have had very positive experiences myself with the Closer to MOP project and ContextL, where many - almost all - Common Lisp vendors were very open to bug fixes and suggestions for improvements, to the extent that the overall support for MOP-based extensions has been considerably improved. Another more recent example is the adoption of ASDF 2.x, which is by now included as a default system definition facility in many Common Lisp implementations. There are more such examples.

Thanks,
Pascal

On 29 Jun 2011, at 00:06, Daniel Weinreb wrote:

Hi.   I read Christophe's paper on extensible sequences.  I don't think
this bears on my new package, though, for two reasons:

(1) it's only about sequences; maps don't fit into its framework.

(2) He is proposing here a change that would have to be made
to every Common Lisp implementation.  As may have been
apparent from other email I've sent, I am, sadly, pessimistic
that we can really get all of the implementors to make changes
in harmony.  It's not that they are bad or incompetent or
anything like that.  It's just that they're busy people with
other priorities.  In some cases, the priorities include
"putting food on the table" (in the metaphorical sense),
i.e. it would be easier if someone could pay them to
do this, but I don't see how that would happen.

Anyway, thanks for pointing me at this very interesting
paper.

-- Dan


On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 10:13 AM, Alessio Stalla <alessiostalla@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 3:38 PM, Daniel Weinreb <dlw@google.com> wrote:
> Could you tell me where to find that?  Thanks. -- Dan

The paper - titled "User-extensible sequences in Common Lisp" by C.
Rhodes - can be found for example here:
<http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.65.1604&rep=rep1&type=pdf>

I don't remember how well the paper describes SBCL's implementation; I
think it's worth taking a look at it to see how it combines CLOS (for
genericity) with regular functions special-cased on CL built-in types.
ABCL's impl is almost a clone of SBCL's, with only minor adaptations.

I agree that classes in CLOS are overrated. CLOS is mainly about
generic functions and it's a pity, imho, that GFs can only be
specialized on classes. With minor changes CLOS could be more general.

Cheers,
Alessio

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--
Pascal Costanza
The views expressed in this email are my own, and not those of my employer.