enhancements needed, resources for achieving them

[haible (Bruno Haible)]

[Forwarded from David Gadbois <gadbois@cs.utexas.edu> = <gadbois@mcc.com>.]

    Date: Tue, 11 Jan 1994 16:28-0600
    From: donc@ISI.EDU (Don Cohen)

    I've been discussing (via netmail) with Bruno and, more recently
    Marcus, some enhancements to CLISP that we (at least I) think would
    be useful.  I thought it was time to open the discussion to a wider
    audience.

Here are a few things (in no particular order) I plan to work on
whenever I get the time over the next few months:

o Logical pathnames (2/3 done)
o A fancy debugger
o LOOP
o Source code locators
o Who-calls
o ILISP interface (mostly working)

If you are already working on some of these or have thoughts on what is
needed, please let me know.

These are is all straightforward things that can be pretty much just
churned out.  (Well, not the debugger.)  More ambitious projects I would
like to do but will probably never have enough time to get around to
are:

o Threads

Doing a nice thread package ala Genera/Lucid/Allegro involves changing
things at a really basic level, since assumptions the system makes about
global state will not necessarily hold.  And doing it portably without
giving up on using the C stack would be really tricky.

o More compiler analysis

I really like having a compiler that really grovels over the source code
looking for problems ala CMU CL.

    - a "generic" stream capability, where the programmer supplies lisp
    functions to do all the primitive operations on the stream.

The hard parts of this appear to be designing a good, extensible
protocol and dealing with system bootstrapping issues.  Check out the
Gray stream proposal on parcftp for a semi-standardized generic stream
interface for "character" streams.  A complete solution would have to
deal with block-oriented streams, asynchronous events, encapsulation,
etc.  The stream protocol in the CLIM 2.0 spec may be a good guide for
all this that.

--David Gadbois