Other-LISP-versions-of-CLUE

[Ian Horswill <idh@AI.AI.MIT.EDU>]

Hmmm.  I did it over the summer, so I don't remember what version of
CLUE I was using.  I was using a Beta version of Lucid 3.0 and the
latest versions of PCL.

There were lots of problems.  The #+explorer things weren't too bad, it
was when they didn't have #+'s in things, such as references to the tv
package that I had problems.  CLUE also exercised many things in CLOS
which had not been very thoroughly tested in PCL, such as specializing
generic functions with quoted parameters.  I spend a couple weeks trying
to figure out what CLUE was doing only to find out that PCL was doing
the wrong thing.  Then I got to learn how PCL worked.  I also had to do
some obnoxious hacking around with the I/O system in lucid so that it
would support CLOS instances as I/O streams, and so the reader would
support weird characters like #\Refresh.  Oh, and I also had to do some
weird things to make the packages I was using which wanted the old
version of make-instance, etc. get the old version, and CLUE have the
new.  There may have been other things, I had to do, I don't remember.

All in all, it was the least pleasant summer job of my life and did bad
things for my self-esteem.  I spend so much time fixing CLX, PCL, and
CLOS that I got virtually no work done on the real project at hand.

I've been planning on trying to bring things back up this month so I'll
tell you if things still work or if they broke from bit rot over the
fall.

-ian