Hi Tim, I put your last two messages about the aliases in VMLISP.LISP together, I hope you don't mind.
root <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >> 1) Aliases in general aren't terribly useful. > > In general they are not. But if you want to provide porting > functions that cover the semantics of two different functions > it is useful in lisp to just store a pointer in the function > cell of a symbol. It's a porting technique, not a useful > idea in general. Sure. > I should point out that you have to be VERY CAREFUL in axiom. > Not all function names that are used show up in the source. > This is NOT OBVIOUS. Axiom dynamically constructs some function > names so you cannot just grep to decide if something is being > used or not. I thought so, which is one of the reasons I didn't actually remove anything. If we remove a function that's actually used, we'll notice pretty soon, though. > Plus Axiom plays some optimization games. Functions are initially > defined as 'autoload' which is just a trigger function. On first > use the trigger function loads the actual code which replaces the > function definition so it will have the correct definition on the > second and subsequent uses. There are other automatic 'inline' > operations that occur in order to speed up computation. What is this optimizing for? Memory? Is it still necessary? > At the present time the code rewrite is removing many of these > functions completely. Bookvol5.pamphlet will not only be common > lisp but will be ANSi common lisp. The net effect is that files > like vmlisp will go away. That's what I was trying to help with. The whole thing grew out of the recent GUI discussion. Since there is no broad consensus on the GUI and several other questions, Cliff and I tried to find a minimal common ground. We finally agreed that chunking up and documenting Axiom's internals is a useful project, that anyone can participate in. Kai _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
