Subject: Re: Core Lisp (was Re: cautios question (about languages)) From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 1999/07/29 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3142236838820710@naggum.no> * Tim Bradshaw <tfb@tfeb.org> | I realised another thing about this. CL, as it stands, is probably | marginal on small devices -- a palm pilot for instance will probably only | just run something like a small CL system. So, superficially, it looks | like a sensible thing to produce a shrunken CL with less functionality. | But in the year or so it takes to design that, the memory available on | all these tiny devices has doubled, so the old, bloated, CL would have | fit. So, really, I don't see an argument for a core CL based around a | requirement for small devices. a handheld computer with Common Lisp would need an editor that would be a little different from what we're used to. perhaps it doesn't make much sense to deal with textual input and then reading it the normal way? the discussion about context-sensitive structure editors may be more useful when dealing with handhelds than with keyboard-based computers. in other words, the complexity of reading input may be significantly reduced in one end, while we pay for the interface on the other end. I don't see the point in a quick compiler -- leave those to the development tools to be used on other computers. something like CLISP would probably be more beneficial on a handheld than a full-blown native compiler. on a handheld computer, there would be a definitite need for fully dynamic CLOS support, as the "program" would be started once and the objects would essentially live forever. | There may be other reasons -- ease of porting perhaps? However I think | even this turns out not to be that good an argument, since there are at | least 2 pretty portable public CLs -- gcl and clisp -- and one apparently | very portable commercial offering -- Franz Allegro. I don't see any purpose in a Core Lisp at all. whether you should allow the tree shaking before rather than after application development doesn't seem like a question worth answering at this time. #:Erik -- suppose we blasted all politicians into space. would the SETI project find even one of them?