On 15/04/14 14:56, Bill Page wrote:
I doubt that Waldek wants backwards compatibility just for its own sake.
True but the impression I get with boot code is not just that its got minimum documentation and minimum typing written in an obscure language that is hardly documented itself. But, as far as I can make out, the whole scratchpad project seems to have been used by IBM as a testbed for research projects which, while being very clever, did not always pay off in terms of producing maintainable code. Sometimes this sort of code seems to produce unexpected anomalies and just reproducing that in another language doesn't really solve the problem. I get the impression there are parts (only parts) of the code where it would be better to rewrite from scratch, it may break some old stuff which relies on the anomalies but it would be a much firmer foundation for the future.
Also I find SExpressions and their associated pretends quite evil (I know there are a few cases where we have to use them). One of the advantages of moving to SPAD is that it is more strongly typed, but using SExpressions+pretends seems to turn it back into a loosely typed language again. This may not be a problem for you guys, if you know what types to expect, but for me it would lead to runtime errors which are harder to find than compile time errors. I would find it much easier to go directly to high level code and debug that.
I do not see much arguing going on here, in fact it looks very cooperative to me.
I didn't mean to imply any animosity. I find this sort of discussion very useful. I just did not want to annoy other people, on the group, if there is any danger of going over old ground.
But what you are advocating does seem both impractical and naive.
Perhaps but big projects can afford to waste resources, but developers here seem so thin on the ground that it should be easier to coordinate better.
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