flavors like a 3600

[John Foderaro (on an h19-u) <jkf%ucbmike@Berkeley>]

  The flavors story:
	There are two versions of Flavors that work on Franz.
One you can get, one you can't.  The one you can get comes from
Liz Allen at the University of Maryland (liz.umcp-cs@csnet-relay).
It is well documented but its syntax is not exactly like you
would find on a 3600.

  The alternative is one written by someone with access to a 3600, and
which is thus pretty close to what you would find on a 3600 (as
far as the syntax goes).  It has a very long and unfinished story:
	
The 4.1bsd version of flavors.l was written by a student at MIT.  It
did a less than adequate implementation of flavors because franz didn't
have a 'closure' feature.

We added 'fclosure's to franz, which are as close to closures as we could
get.

Richard Zippel, an MIT prof working for Symbolics at the time rewrote
flavors.l from scratch using fclosures and passed it on to us.

We replaced our old flavors.l with Zippel's.  We then learned that we
couldn't distribute flavors.l for a short while until a deal was worked
with Symbolics' lawyers.

Years have passed and Symbolics has yet to permit us to distribute flavors.l .

Sorry, there is no happy ending to the story.  There is a moral: "If you do
something of value, don't ever ever let the lawyers find out about it".

				john foderaro