re: MCL Direction

[zilla@ccrl.nec.com (John Lewis)]

To throw in another brief opinion, mcl is just great.  It definitely 
stands up to lisp implementations available under unix (though I don't
know how it compares to the Lisp machine environment).

For macintosh application development, mcl is suitable for
rapid development of limited market/high end applications such as
cad,expert systems, etc.  As pointed out in a previous message, the
Pagemaker/Excel (and even Word) type applications are gradually
adding macro languages and other features which lisp has builtin--
in a year or two the resource requirements of mcl will not be
out of line with those of a typical $500 mac application.

Once 2.0 final is released, I think apple should try to promote
mcl to more developers.  The mac needs a quick development system
other than hypercard and the gui world needs alternatives to
c++ and visual basic.

john lewis
nec research institute