[Openmcl-devel] New 0.14 binaries

[Camille Troillard]

On Dec 21, 2003, at 6:09 AM, Gary Byers wrote:

> so (as you noted) if we do (DEFSYSTEM :some-symbol) we get a TYPE-ERROR
> that (in at least one sense) we richly deserve.

I think this extra check will very useful in the case of more complex 
types.  It can even help to you to find bugs hidden behind layers of 
macros ...  This makes me think about the story about the Symbolics C 
compiler that discovered bugs while compiling X11.


> The other argument would be that the :TYPE of the NAME slot is too
> strict, and we seem to have evidence that symbols in fact make
> perfectly reasonable COMPONENT-NAMEs (and have done so for some time.)
> I'm not sure whether it'd be better to have the DEFSYSTEM macro
> coerce its NAME argument to a string or whether it'd be better
> for the slot to have a more lenient type constraint.

Yes, a symbol would have been more appropriate.
Anyway, everyone use a symbol.


I can understand this behaviour as it enforces the quality of the code 
at compile time.
I'd be curious to know what they do in commercial Lisps like LIspWorks 
or ACL.


Thanks for the explanations.

Camille