Re: LISP - Oracle

[moon (David A. Moon)]

> Date: Tue, 18 Aug 92 15:05:20 EST
> From: cfry@MIT.EDU (Christopher Fry)
> 
> Franz, Lucid, Symbolics, and Harlequin seem to be moving in this direction.
> I'm not sure what Apple's plans are but please join me in encouraging
> Apple to cooperate here. In particular, a standard FFI to C code
> might go a long way toward writing useful portable utilities like an SQL
> interface.

I will just offer my own opinion here, intended to cut the Gordian knot that I 
think prevented foreign function interface standardization in the past, which 
is that the various vendors couldn't agree on the syntax of the Lisp macro 
that declares a foreign function and specifies the types of its arguments and 
result.  The answer is, don't have a Lisp macro for this, make the Lisp 
compiler read C header files instead.  It's not very hard to implement.  This 
is more convenient for the user, too.

The vendors would still have to agree on the mapping of C names and types to 
Lisp.  I have an opinion on that, too, but it's too lengthy to include here.

Feel free to forward this message to other vendors or mailing lists if you 
wish.

These are my personal opinions, not necessarily the opinions of Apple Computer 
nor of the Macintosh Common Lisp product developers.