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Date: Thu, 5 May 1994 18:55:37 -0400
From: miller@cs.rochester.edu
X-Government: What we really need on the ballot is "None of the above."
References: <9405050032.AA09414@vapor.Franz.COM>
<94May5.154016pdt.32390@sparkie.parc.xerox.com>
>>>>> "William" == William M York <york@parc.xerox.com> writes:
William> Of course, I don't have to tell you where I stand on these
William> issues, but I thought that I'd raise the point as a way of
William> publicly checking the state of things. I think everyone
William> loses in the long run when individual vendors extend
William> outside the spec, even when those extensions are good ideas
William> in and of themselves.
I disagree with this completely. If that had been the attitude with CL,
then nobody would have any support for Defsystem, Multiprocessing, or
FFI (to name three :-), at all without "ANSI permission".
Vendors should be able (need to be able) to provide upward compatible
extensions if for no other reason than to support their customers. So
long as these are clearly identified as non-portable extensions, I don't
see a problem, and they provide a valuable testbed for future portable
language extensions.
I'm sympathetic with what you have to say, but strictly speaking,
:MENU-BAR isn't an upward-compatible extension. This is innocuous
enough that somebody might try it in Allegro CLIM and expect it to
work elsewhere, but it won't.
As I have said before to the folks at Franz, when they make such
extension to CLIM, they have a responsibility to the people using CLIM
to report such extensions to the other people working on CLIM. So far
they have not been very good about doing this.
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