MCL 2.1

[cfry@MIT.EDU (Christopher Fry)]

Enhancements to MCL2.1 I'd like to see:

- Full MOP
- Persistent Object Store
  [This need not be an apple-made solution. In fact, preferably it would be just
   and interface to some other CLOS-based DB that works on a number of 
   other machines.]
- Portable Window system. CLIM-2 looks like the current best candidate but I'm
  open to other solutions so long as they've got at least as many features as
  MCL window system and are widely portable without major code changes.
- Related to the above, there are a few cases of software that lets you run
  Mac applications on other machines [Unix boxes, PC's.] It may be the case that
  MCL will just work with one of these. It would be nice if someone could
  figure out which is the best one, work with the developers of it to make sure
  that it can support the kind of stand-alone apps people are likely to write in MCL
  and to maintain a list of things you CAN"T do [if any] with such a tool, plus
  workarounds. My hope is that this would be big gain for little work.
  Macweek Jan 20, 92, page 1 has an article about one such product for
  running Mac-developed applications on Unix machines.
  Quarum Software Systems Inc., Menlo Park, CA.

- Henry's plea for debugging tools represents potentially a big project.
  In a nutshell, its for improving what MCL already does best and is its
  big selling point. Perhaps I could help separate out this issue into
  three parts: low-level, tool-building utilities and high-level.
  - The low-level is support for when you're really wedged and have to go into Macsbug.
    Whatever help a hacker can get here is valuable.
   [Of course whatever you can do to make it less likely that you need to use
   Macsbug in the first place is important. For instance, I have difficulty with 
   code that errors during event processing.]
  - Tool-building utils means support for building fancy steppers. etc.
    Documented functions for letting you look at the stack and functions for
    getting useful info out of low-level mac data structures fall into this
    category
  - High-level are inspector/browsers, tools for helping you write code
    [like better arglist info] and backwards steppers. There's a mess of
    little tools in here that would make life easier. For example, merging the
    two search dialogs and giving us a menu instead of having
    to type in a directory name.