Re: Packages: where is the beef ?

[ks@cs.tut.fi (Syst{ Kari)]

Thanks for all you who answered to me. As someone suspected, I was rather
frustrated when I wrote that article. As a result of this discussion
I'm starting to understand that Lisp is not that good as a (general
purpose) programming language. 

I don't program with lisp every day and usually when I do I'm inside my
own package. Every time I update to a new version of Lisp or when I make
larger changes to my application, I have to learn the package concept
again. Somehow it is so compilicated and different of my model of menthal
packages. (which, in fact, is based on the package concept of Ada).

As many of you pointed out, when I define a new package the huge
lisp-package is imported. Like some of you pointed out, many of the
symbols should not be directly imported. (Consider Ada, for instance,
there even simple I/O must be explicitely exported).

In my understanding this Lisp-style of importing has two problems:
  - the amount of automatically imported symbols is abosolutely too
    big
  - when defining new objects (with defstruct for instance) the name
    refers automatically to imported one. What I would like to have
    is kind of lvalue - rvalue concept for definitions. I understand that
    this is almost impossible because of the Lisp-reader.



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% This article represents my personal views.
% Kari Systa, Tampere Univ. Technology, Box 553, 33101 Tampere, Finland
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