[Openmcl-devel] "UNSGIGNED-BYTE" typo.

[Gary Byers]

On Wed, 13 Oct 2010, Kaz Kylheku wrote:

>
> $ ccl
> Welcome to Clozure Common Lisp Version 1.5-r13651 (LinuxX8632)!
> ? (decode-string-from-octets #(1 2 3) :external-format :utf-8)
>> Error: value # is not of the expected type (ARRAY (CCL::UNSGIGNED-BYTE
> 8) (*)).
>

Yup; thanks.

> But decode-string-from-octets does actually work if you give it an array
> whose :element-type is (unsigned-byte 8).
>
> How do you get bad spelling from a good type check?
>
> By checking the typecode explicitly and using a "dead list"
> to generate the error condition.
>


> P.S.
>
> Does the mailing list really need the [subject line marker] disease? You can 
> easily  tell that it's list-related traffic if "openmcl-devel" is a to: or 
> cc: recipient.

A few hundred users subscribe to the list, and many of them may use
the subject line marker to sort, filter, or otherwise recognize
incoming mail.  Assuming that it was easy to remove that marker, do
you really think that they should filter their mail differently because
you don't like the marker ?

Speaking of subscribing to the list: mail from non-subscribers is "held for
approval", as the message that should be sent to non-subscribers in that case
(and the prose on <http://clozure.com/mailman/listinfo/openmcl-devel>) explains.
This means that someone (usually me) has to manually look through any such
"held" messages and decide which are on-topic and which are spam.

Clozure uses a commercial spam-filtering service now, but it used to
be the case that the list received several hundred pieces of spam each
day (and very, very occasionally recieved an on-topic message from a
non-subscriber.)   I quite frankly stopped trying to wade through that
mess, and I'm sure that some on-topic messages were lost as a result.

The commercial spam-filtering works pretty well, and on-topic messages
from non-subscribers are a lot easier to recognize and manually
approve.  It's still a manual process and though I've tried to get
back into the habit of processing the queue somewhat regularly, I'm
sure that I still miss some messages that might have been of interest.

So: if you want to send mail to the list, please subscribe to the list
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that saying this to an audience of (mostly) subscribers who read the
web page and/or "held for approval" notices is less than ideal, but
do want to make sure that the subscribers-only policy and the reasons
for it are understood.


























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