Subject: Re: abstraction, OO and macros (Was: CMU CL vs. CLISP?)
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Date: 1999/07/30
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3142323454039562@naggum.no>

* Pierpaolo Bernardi
| I wonder in what abominable lisp assembler style are written programs
| written by allegro users because of this limitation of their compiler.

  call it whatever you like, but it is indistinguisable from well-written
  Common Lisp.  you see, some Allegro CL users have discovered compiler
  macros and truly wonder what the hell this inline business is all about.

| (Sorry, I have nothing against the Allegro compiler.  Just against some
| of its most obnoxious users).

  yeah, it's really irritating to have people show you a better way to do
  something which blows all your arguments to bits, but you, too, can use
  compiler macros, and the need for inlining just vanishes.  of course, you
  can still complain that Allegro CL ignores (DECLARE INLINE), but I don't
  think it'll have the same intensity once you know the better way to do it.

  when Franz Inc has finished their ongoing work on environments, which was
  lost from CLtL2 because it hadn't been done right at the time, you can
  write your code in two stages: (1) the clean, neat expression of intent,
  and (2) the dirty details in compiler macros.  that's how I prefer to do
  things already, instead of littering my code with declarations, so this
  will just get better and better.  inlining probably won't be able to use
  environment information at all.

  (and with that, I'm gone for a good ten days, again.  see you at IJCAI.)

#:Erik, probably obnoxious
-- 
  suppose we blasted all politicians into space.
  would the SETI project find even one of them?