Subject: Re: IS(O-)Lisp status?
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Date: 1996/07/23
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3047102938994282@arcana.naggum.no>


[Richard A. O'Keefe]

|   I don't think the ease of calling C functions from Sun's ESH can be beaten.
|   If I read the (somewhat patchy) documentation, this even extends to C++.
|   Step 1:	slurp the appropriate header using "ix"
|   Step 2: load the Scheme file written by "ix"
|   Step 3: you're away laughing.

you realize, of course, that this can be true for any product and any
language, regardless of how much work this "ix" thingy does.

|   What this establishes is that there is no reason for gratuitous ISLisp/
|   Scheme incompatibility on the grounds of ease of foreign interfacing.

non sequitur.  unless you're in the business of selling "ix"'es or "esh"'es.

|   ESH provides this via a borrowing (without acknowledgement) of the old
|   Pop-2 idea of "updaters".  Again, it's an *extension* to Scheme, with a
|   proven record of working extremely well in practice since the '60s,
|   that doesn't need to break existing code.

the issue is that ISO Lisp has opted for a notation for dynamic variables
that differs significantly from the traditional way to declare special
properties on variables, and has not done so consistently or open-endedly.

I actually fail to see what ESH is doing in here at all, unless it has been
a major influence on the design of ISO Lisp, which I sort of doubt.

#\Erik