[Openmcl-devel] Package locks?

[Gary Byers]

On Tue, 30 Mar 2004, Peter Seibel wrote:

> Does OpenMCL have anything like Allegro's or CMUCL's package locking?
> I.e. something to prevent code outside a package  from mucking with
> the definitions attached to symbols in the package?
>
> -Peter
>
> --
> Peter Seibel                                      peter at javamonkey.com
>
>          Lisp is the red pill. -- John Fraser, comp.lang.lisp

No.  At first glance, the idea seems wrong (or maybe more accurately
half-right), but that's not an opinion that's based on actually having
used them (or having thought about the idea for more than a few minutes.)

That's mostly based on the observation that packages were the wrong
way to enforce modularity in the first place (they also happen to be
the primary way of doing so in CL ...), and that extending a bad way
of enforcing modularity doesn't -sound- like the right thing.  It's
certainly possible that people would find them more useful in practice
than they appear to me to be in theory.