Subject: Re: Implementational Portability (was: multiple-value binding let and   let*)
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Date: 1999/08/23
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3144377424777287@naggum.no>

* William Deakin
| Although I accept the point about 'contact your vendor', these seem to me
| to be subtle errors, (as highlighted by this thread), and who would you
| know to do this?  Only those who are sufficiently experienced or with
| access to the ANSI standard (or is this to be a requirement of all cl
| programmers?) I could see somebody as cack handed as myself getting
| seriously burnt some day and spending alot of time recovering.

  a serious programmer who does not know what to expect from his compiler
  is a contradiction in terms.  I don't think _any_ programmer who has not
  actually read and actually understood the specification of his language,
  or at least the parts thereof that he uses, should be allowed to write
  code for other people than himself unless it occurs under very close
  supervision by someone who does know the specification.

  of course, this is predicated on the desire to see programming as a
  professional discipline on par with law, medicine, auditing, etc, not the
  (continuation of) largely unskilled labor that happens to get paid to do
  any kind of non-quality work because the market is in desperate need of
  just about _anything_ to solve their mostly perceived problems or to keep
  going after making a seriously misguided decision about which software to
  invest in in the first place.

#:Erik
-- 
  (defun pringles (chips)
    (loop (pop chips)))