push/defvst interaction?

[George J. Carrette <GJC at MIT-MC>]

As a bit of honest practical advice, I would concur with ALAN in
suggesting that you use DEFSTRUCT in preference to DEFVST.
The story goes like this: DEFVST was supposed to be part of
a package of code which was "NILCOM," common to both NIL and Maclisp,
and presumably to be part of "common-lisp." As it turned out though,
the implementation of all of that "NILCOM" code was too tentative
and kludgy to be worth bringing up in actual VAX NIL, so instead
code like Defstruct (which is de-facto common-lisp)
was brought up. So you see, there can be little
incentive here (at MIT) to support/fix-bugs in code such as DEFVST.

On the other hand, it is quite easy for me to make available to
you an option to defstruct called "EXTEND" which does the same
job as "DEFVST" except that the interface is a lot cleaner,
and it actually works! (It is what RLB and I used last summer to
cross-compile NIL from the pdp-10 to the VAX). You can get it
by FTPing "GJC;SFIX FASL" from the MIT-MC machine. Source is in
"GJC;SFIX >" on MIT-MC.

To answer your question about source code: The most up-to-date
versions of things are on the LIBDOC, LSPSRC, and NILCOM directories
on MIT-MC. The *best* solution seems to be to keep a winning
Maclisp environment working on MIT-OZ, and let people FTP
stuff from there.

-gjc