a time for everything

[Gregor J. Kiczales <gregor@parc.xerox.com>]

In the past couple of weeks I have had a number of conversations with
various Lisp vendors about their CLOS implementation plans.  As most of
you know, a number of vendors have already released their own native
CLOS implementations.  Other vendors have been planning to base their
initial CLOS products on enhanced versions of PCL.

It now appears to be the case that the last of the vendors planning to
base their initial implementations on PCL have begun the modifications
they plan to make.  They are now off on their own track.  This is great
news, it means that no matter what Common Lisp you use, you will soon
have access to a supported, product-quality CLOS implementation.

It also implies that the PCL development effort here at PARC has come to
a natural transition point.  It is now time for PCL development to
subside and let vendor development take over.  The vendors will be able
to do things that never could happen in PCL.

In order to facilitate the transition to the various vendor-specific
CLOS implementations, and to help all existing PCL users wait until
their vendor has an implementation available, I plan to coordinate one
more release of PCL.  This release will be Rainy Day PCL, with the
various patches that have been suggested since it was sent out.  IF YOU
HAVE SUCH A PATCH, PLEASE SEND IT TO ME EVEN IF YOU HAVE SENT IT BEFORE.

We will also provide a permanent home (on arisia.xerox.com) for copies
of the PCL sources and related public domain CLOS code.  In the future,
if you have modifications to PCL or other code you would like to store
on arisia, contact me and I will help coordinate this.  In addition, to
provide a forum for CLOS users to discuss the language and their work
with it, PARC will continue to maintain the CommonLoops@xerox.com
mailing list.

I want to thank all the people who have, in the past few years, helped
with PCL.  I especially want to thank all of those patient PCL users.
Your use of PCL, and the comments you made, provided a lot of feedback
to the CLOS design group.  This feedback helped shape CLOS into the
language it is today.

Gregor Kiczales