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features

I'd like to suggest that the CLIM vendors put some effort into
establishing a more standard, more useful features list (i.e.,
*features*) in the interest of facilitating portability among
platforms.

Obviously, :CLIM should be on the features list for all CLIM
implementations.  It is version information that I want to address.
I suggest that all vendors ensure that symbols naming both the major
and minor version are on the features list, and that alpha/beta
designations be encoded separately.

For example, I suggest the following symbols be defined for the
following releases:

CLIM 1.1	   :CLIM     :CLIM-1	:CLIM-1.1
CLIM 2.0 alpha	   :CLIM     :CLIM-2	:CLIM-2.0    :CLIM-2.0-alpha
CLIM 2.1	   :CLIM     :CLIM-2    :CLIM-2.1

My reasoning is that there will be certain systematic differences
between all the CLIM 1.X versions and all the CLIM 2.X versions, and
that we should be able to use #+CLIM-2 or #-CLIM-1 to designate such
dependencies in our code once, for all time.  If I were to use
#+CLIM-2.0, or #-CLLIM-1.1 my code would do the wrong thing when I
tried to use it under CLIM-2.1 or CLIM-1.0.

I would specifically request that vendors NOT include symbols for
previous versions, e.g., a CLIM 2.0 implementation should not include
:CLIM-1.1.  (I have seen this case occur, which is why I point this
out.)

This type of planning in the feature list will let us conditionalize
code at a much more accurate level of granularity.  Code will be
portable across different sites and different platforms.

Peter
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