Subject: Re: Where's your Lisp software, Janos Blazi? From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: Sat, 08 Sep 2001 08:51:00 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3208927859399198@naggum.net> * Tim Moore <moore@herschel.bricoworks.com> > As a student, wouldn't it have been instructive to be able to do so, at > least for the C library if not the compiler? Have you tried to peek inside the GNU C library? Have you looked at P. J. Plauger: The Standard C Library, for instance? Generally speaking, library stuff is really advanced stuff. > Stevens acquired the understanding he needed to write his fabulous books > by.... reading the source code! Undoubtedly true, but for the purposes of understanding how the Common Lisp part of the system is defined, you actually get source code to that with Allegro CL. (Except for the horribly primitive IF* style which pervades the whole source code base and causes an unreadable mess that is both much more verbose and produces less efficient machine code than more efficient implementations that are quite evident when you rewrite it to use more of Common Lisp to boot, so there is simply no excuse for it whatsoever.) > Hmm, PCL, sounds like the source to Lisp implementation to me. Well, PCL was the reason I did _not_ delve into and use CLOS much. Allegro CL was the reason I did. Sometimes, performance does count. > I was arguing that, among other reasons, Free Lisp implementations and > applications are important for educational reasons. I think we've about > flogged that into the ground. They are, but you should not dismiss all alternatives because you have found what you think is a panacea. That is actually all that is attempted by those who seem to oppose free implementations. ///