Re: Thoughts on the simplification of CLISP

[Blake M. <bl...@mc...>]

On Tue, Jan 10, 2017 at 4:28 PM, Pascal Bourguignon <pj...@in...>
wrote:

>
> On 10 Jan 2017, at 22:16, Sam Steingold <sd...@gn...> wrote:
>
>
> You mean, "the problem is surface rather than content".
> I agree.
>
> However, there is a Russian proverb: "One is greeted according to one's
> dress, one is sent off according to one's intelligence".
> Yes, intelligence (=="substance") is more important, but if you wear
> rugs, people won't even talk to you and will never discover your
> intelligence.
>
> I think we need to drop the gratuitous preprocessors (varbrace &
> comment5) and rename all files to *.c.
> We need to preprocess them into *.m.c behind the scenes.
> lisbpbibl.d should be lisbpbibl.h and not preprocessed.
> &c.
>
>
> Well, I both agree and disagree.
>
>
> Pure C code is good, and it would be great for portability, if one could
> write 100% purely standard C11 code.
> Like, no trick like libsigsegv, or worse ffcall/avcall which can never be
> compiled on new or exotic systems.
> Just pure standard entirely defined behavior C11 code.
>
> I’d like that.
>


Making the base source straight C is the first step IMO.  Having a version
that is straight C11 is the second step!  Having system specific code to
add facilities and speed is fine so long as it is ifdef'ed so as not
required.



>
> You’d not like it at all, because it might imply a performance hit.
>  (Probably a serious performance hit
> even, if you want to implement all the features we have).
>
>
>
>
> On the other hand, I’m not sure the solution is to go toward C.  Why not
> write lisp code, and have a
> translator that generates some throw away intermediary C code, that can be
> compiled anywhere?
>

That would be great.


>
>
> Recently compiled a project that was build this way:
> https://github.com/aoh/radamsa
> It’s actually written in Scheme, and it uses OL (
> https://github.com/aoh/owl-lisp/files/449350) a scheme to C translator,
> to generate the C code that is then compiled. Since OL itself is written
> in scheme, and applied on itself to produce the C sources
> that are distributed. So you have a 100% C bootstrap path.
>
> On the other hand, you can implement the software in a high level
> programming language.
>


Either of these is fine, but I fear we are beginning to talk about a whole
new version.  Not needed.

Blake