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Getting going on CLIM

    From: Peter Paine <p2@porter.asl.dialnet.symbolics.com>

    You refer to your CLIM documentation (poor as it may be). Is this Franz
    CLIM documentation? I have various incomplete and different CLIM
    documentation sets. At present, running CLOE 3 CLIM there seems to be no
    up to date documentation at all.

    Is there any documentation available? I asked ILA and got a polite and
    friendly reply to the effect that the new documentation was due out
    soon. But being impatient (and aware that things often take several
    months to cross the Atlantic), I want something relevant right now,
    especially a DocEx sab file.

The current CLIM documentation is included in the kit that you get when
you order CLIM from your Lisp vendor.  ILA has provided the basic
reference manual material to each vendor.  The actual manual that you
receive may be enhanced or modified by the vendor.

Because of the cross-vendor portability constraint, ILA's CLIM material
was not prepared using Concordia, and is therefore not universally
available in sab file form.  I believe that Symbolics provides on-line
access to the CLOE CLIM documentation.

The current 0.9 CLIM reference manual is not the final form of the
document.  It is a work in progress.  This is one of the major reasons
for the "0.9 developer's pre-release" designation of the current CLIM
release.

Each vendor is supplying the front-line support for its version of CLIM. 
They will be prepared to handle calls and provide information about
known bug fixes.  New or difficult problems will be referred to ILA.
There is a mailing list, bug-clim@ila.com, that can be used to report
problems directly to ILA.

    A question about # reader macros. There are so many new features being
    pushed into cl:*features* by such a variety of different systems, that I
    am beginning to worry that there is a danger of creating confusion here.

    In the past, when I expected a vendor to send me an environment with the
    *features* list as a "given" part of the system, I treated it as gospel
    - maybe pushnewing something private in as related to local hardware.

    Now, I am constantly surprised by what I find in *features*. Is there a
    body which agrees on the contents of *features* and their meaning - in a
    manner which is agreed by all vendors and is very reliable?

I don't have a real answer for this.  CLIM makes substantial use of the
*features* list, and even pushes some "private" features on the list for
use by the CLIM source code.  Perhaps the "external" declaration of what
facilities are loaded should be restricted to something like the *modules*
list (which I believe has been flushed in ANSI Common Lisp).  Some
appropriate subset of the CL community should decide this issue.

    Looking at the Express Windows and CLIM sysdcls, I see these features
    referred to:

    symbolics :x :clx :unix ignore pcl lispworks lucid-editor lucid genera
    cloe-runtime :lucid :excl (and excl sun3) (and excl sun4) 3600
    :genera-release-8 :genera

    For a start, there is ":lucid" and "lucid" to confuse me.

Keywords are safest.


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