Error Proposal #5: difficulties and suggestions

[Kent M Pitman <KMP@SCRC-STONY-BROOK.ARPA>]

    Date: Tue, 6 May 1986  16:12 EDT
    From: "Scott E. Fahlman" <Fahlman@C.CS.CMU.EDU>

    I believe that KMP was going to produce a nearly-portable implementaiton
    matching his proposal?  Is that still the plan?  For something like an
    error system, it's hard to know what is awkward and what is nice until
    you've used it for real.  I'd like to have some experience outside the
    Lisp Machine environment on this stuff BEFORE we make it an official
    part of Common Lisp.

Jonathan Rees had volunteered do the implementation. I'd been psyched about
that because I was hoping to get some feedback from someone who hadn't used
the LispM about how intelligible the English of the proposal was based on their
having tried to implement it without seeing any code from me. I'd like the
implementation not to be the proposal since that could lead to complications.

Jonathan got bogged down with other commitments, though, and so asked to be
let off the hook. I'm pretty sure it's only about a day's work to bring up,
but I've been very busy and I haven't had a day free in the past two or so months. 
I have free time coming up later this month and hope to get to it then...
Anyone who's in a hurry is of course free to pick up the spec and do a
portable implementation sooner if their schedule is more open than mine.
				     
I'm very pleased that Daniels@Xerox has been able to work from the spec 
and derive a running version to play with, though, because that will give us
the kind of feedback I was originally hoping to get from Jonathan. I have
the impression that his implementation is either not portable or is proprietary,
but hopefully after he's played with it a bit he'll at least give us the feedback
about whether there are big holes in the spec (we've already heared some 
comments about that) and whether the features provided are interesting, 
easy-to-learn, useful, etc.