[Openmcl-devel] *features*: which keyword to use when conditionalizing code for Clozure CL?

[Gary Byers]

On Mon, 15 Feb 2010, R.Stoye wrote:

> Hi,
> since :opemcl is reserved for the opensource variant of MCL:
> is :clozure appropriate or should i use :clozure-common-lisp

I don't know that :openmcl is "reserved for the opensource variant
of MCL"; I suppose that there is some possibility that that variant
could decide to push :openmcl on *features*.  So could SBCL or
Allegro, of course, but those implementations would have absolutely
no reason to do so; I can't think of a reason for RMCL/MCL to do 
that either, but I suppose that there's a non-zero chance of that
happening someday.  (Barely non-zero.)

Either :CLOZURE or :CLOZURE-COMMON-LISP can be used to uniquely
identify this implementation, and it doesn't seem likely that any
other implementation would have reason to add either of those
keywords to its *FEATURES* or that we'd maintain something that
had :CLOZURE without also having :CLOZURE-COMMON-LISP.

I'd vote for using :CLOZURE to conditionalize for this implementation
in new code and have seen that used in other people's code, but I
can't think of a strong reason to prefer that to :CLOZURE-COMMON-LISP.
Existing code that uses :OPENMCL is probably in no real danger of
breaking in the foreseeable future: I don't think that this implementation
is too likely to remove that feature or that any other implementation
is too likely to introduce it, but N years from now it may be hard to
remember what "OpenMCL" was.  ("It's that string that's still in the
name of Clozure CL's mailing list!")



>
> #+joking:
> i would expect :clozure-cl on the list (see commit 2943 (Hey!
> Marketing!))

We used to have customers/potential customers tell us that they couldn't
use OpenMCL for their project because they didn't use Macs.  This marketing
stuff is not entirely without importance ...

>
> Ralf Stoye
>
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