Luke Gorrie luke@bluetail.com writes:

Bill Clementson bill_clementson@yahoo.com writes:

...

Even if the eventual goal is to replace all the

functionality that

...

is provided by ILM/ILISP, ILISP would provide more

"short-term"

...

benefits for the SLIME CL developer than ILM

would.

That would have been one way, but we went the

clean-room approach. We

only use ILM to start Lisp and compile our server,

and *inferior-lisp*

as a debugging fallback. We've covered all the major

features now,

although there's plenty of hacking left to do to get

all the details

right and support everyone's favourite add-ons.

Starting from scratch means more work/fun, but it

also gives us a

fresh codebase. To an outsider, some of the code in

ILISP is slightly

terrifying :-), as in any program with such a long

Actually, to an insider, some of the code in ILISP is a bit terrifying too ;-)

history. We also wanted to do most things differently and to have an

environment more

like the elisp one, so it would only give us a

head-start in the

short-term.

ELI really doesn't appeal to my hackstincts. From

the web I can't even

tell who wrote it,

Steve Haflich (of Franz) was the author of the very first version of ELI back around 1987. Since then, a number of different Franz hackers have contributed to it.

and most questions on groups.google.com seem to go without definitive answers.

I'm not sure which group you're referring to. As far as I'm aware, there is no Franz/ELI mailing list on groups.google.com. If you're referring to comp.lang.lisp.franz, I'm not surprised as that newsgroup is just about dead - most Franz-specific issues seem to be either directed to c.l.l. or to the allegro-cl mailing list, both of which are very active and both of which you can generally get a quick reply from.

I downloaded my copy from Neil van Dyke's website, which says "Please do not pester Franz to

support this

packaging, lest they regret GPL'ing."

It looks like Franz did the least necessary to be

allowed to link with

Emacs under the GPL, and would be unlikely to let a

dozen random

hackers into their CVS tree :-) so that is a

potential dead-end.

That is a bit unfair. I have personally worked with both Steve Haflich and Kevin Layer on various ELI enhancements and have worked with a number of other Franz employees on other ACL issues. I have always found the Franz people I've dealt with to be very receptive to suggestions as well as terrific programmers. I doubt that you would get better responses to requests or suggestions for improvements at many open source projects.

I should also mention that I am not a licensed ACL user either.

So I think our approach is pretty reasonable. We'll

see how it

goes. I'm even hoping we can tempt some of you fine

hackers to have a

play around on the dark side ;-)

I already mentioned that I use MS Windows - doesn't that qualify me as playing on the dark side already ;-)

And of course my views do not necessarily reflect

those of the other

SLIME hackers,

Aha, now come all the caveats: don't remove the label, not valid with other offers, use before expiration date, etc, etc :-)

but I hope this answers this thread's main question. Note however that this is almost entirely

after-the-fact

rationalization. Really, it was just too addictive

to stop. ;-)

Sorta like having a pint, eh - you can't just have one :-)

-- Bill Clementson

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