As part of making Macintosh Common Lisp (MCL) OpenDoc savvy, I
need to create System Object Model (SOM) bindings for Common Lisp.
This requires a mapping between SOM's (and CORBA's) Interface
Description Language (IDL) and Common Lisp. It also requires
either an IDL parser written in Common Lisp or an addition to
the existing SOM compiler that will emit the Common Lisp bindings.
This is a non-trivial task, at least it seems so with my beginners
knowledge of SOM. I's rather not duplicate existing work. It
would be nice to establish a standard Lisp binding for SOM (CORBA) that
could be shared by all Common Lisp vendors.
I found a reference to a paper on mapping IDL to Common Lisp
[Tom Mowbray and K.L. White, MITRE] on the OMG's web site at
(http://www.omg.org/docs/doclist.txt). I have asked them to send
me a copy.
Xerox PARC's ILU (http://ftp.parc.xerox.com/pub/ilu/ilu.html)
is another possibility, though porting it to MCL may be
as big a task as the entire OpenDoc interface (ILU's C
kernel must first be ported to the Mac).
I am just beginning my investigation. If you can point me to
existing code or specifications or if you would like to help
with the design and/or implementation of the bindings should we
find no existing design/implementation that looks good, please contact
me directly <bitcraft.com). at (bill> Please do not send your responses to all
the mailing lists I included above. I'll provide a summary if requested.
-Bill St. Clair
<bitcraft.com at bill>
<digitool.com at bill>