in open source "advocacy is volunteering" are you volunteering to write the "boot" compiler docs and maintain it? can you set it up as a separate language so we don't need to bootstrap it? you could write bookvol10 (boot language).
to do that you'll have to figure out what parts of axiom are only there to support boot and you'll have to recode the portions of the boot compiler that is written in lisp. will you redo the boot language to support ansi destructuring setq? structures? mcclim? clos? macros? defvars? the bottom line is that without these facilities axiom won't be able to use the latest lisp developments. we will have essentially forked the lisp used by axiom. this is something i do not want to do. we are already off the leading edge of ansi. yet developing those new boot facilities takes me off into designing extensions and enhancements to a language i don't like. and it's a big project. Jenks and Burge spent a lot of time on it. why the feature-debating alone could take years! if we're going to enhance a language i'd much rather the time and energy went into debating new ideas for the spad language. since this is open source development you're welcome to document, support, and enhance boot. for my part, i see no good reason for it to live so i'm certainly not going to spend my time on this. i'm advocating literate programming and have likely committed the rest of my axiom working life to proving (or disproving) the concept. t (btw, axiom lisp has a destructuring setq (which i ported from maclisp). we just don't use it. see doDSETQ and *DCQ* in vmlisp.lisp. the boot compiler SHOULD use it but does not) _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
