Subject: Re: Harlequin vs. Allegro From: Erik Naggum <clerik@naggum.no> Date: 1998/06/29 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3108096841138643@naggum.no> * Scott L. Burson | And it is my understanding that their Windows products, also called | "Allegro", were, at least originally, of yet another lineage; I'm not | sure about the situation today. the latest Windows version, ACL 3.0.2, was a completely different product from the Unix version, ACL 4.3.1, much to my dismay. ACL 5.0 is the same product on both, with Windows-specific stuff coming from the ACL 3.0.2 heritage, like the IDE. the very real and noticeable shortcomings of the Windows offering that I ran forcefully into when one of my first clients insisted on NT (which I didn't know how crappy was at the time) cost me a tremendous amount of work. I have recommended strongly against ACL for Windows since then, and I have always been precise that I'm talking about the Unix version when praising Allegro Common Lisp, but the consolidated version should be as good as the Unix version is. I'm very happy that this particular confusion is now history. | It may be true, or more nearly true, now, but I don't trust Franz in this | area, and if I wanted to develop a Windows application I would use their | (or someone's) Windows product and not try to cross-develop from Unix. yup, been there, tried that. cross-development wasn't even close to doable between ACL 4.3 (an ANSI CL) and ACL 3.0.2 (barely CLtL1 with some CLOS), so I have also yet to fully regain the necessary confidence, but watching the bug fixes and other stuff about ACL 5.0 strongly reinforces their claims to common sources. maybe we can finally get to the point where I wanted to be almost two years ago when this client wanted NT: that one can run Allegro CL and Emacs under Neanderthal Technology and not have to deal with that ill-designed "operating system" at all. to be honest, part of the reason I like and use Common Lisp is that I don't have deal with all the demented Unix heritage, either -- it's a lot of work, but possible, to write clean and neat abstractions on top of the many Unices and not have to deal with their low-level crud and mistakes. speaking of mistakes, I _want_ file versioning. :if-exists :clobber is _not_ my favorite option, and I want (close ... :abort t) to leave the old file intact. that Unix does not offer a way to do this so it's quite hard to get it right has been a pet peeve of mine for years, long before I shifted focus to Common Lisp. safe file I/O generally appears to be up to the application. e.g., I don't want to make a file available to the world until it has been fully written and closed, but that means I have to use temporary filenames and do a rename on close manually under Unix. this is annoying. what's more annoying is that I haven't found a way to hook into the operation of OPEN and CLOSE to automate this behavior. #:Erik -- http://www.naggum.no/spam.html is about my spam protection scheme and how to guarantee that you reach me. in brief: if you reply to a news article of mine, be sure to include an In-Reply-To or References header with the message-ID of that message in it. otherwise, you need to read that page.