MCL's future (is Dylan?!)

[futrelle@ccs.neu.edu (Robert Futrelle)]

We have a research group for which MCL is a critical 
component, as well as Bill's persistent heap system, Wood
Our work receives substantial funding from NSF and DOE
for this. I'm on sabbatical in Edinburgh, one of the
leading centers in AI, touting the great qualities of
MCL. And now this  :-(

But it seems to me that Dylan could be the appropriate
replacement for MCL.  The biggest problem is the legacy
issue.  There are hundreds of thousands of lines of
very useful code at cambridge.apple.com and other sites
that we're all building and building on.

So a lot depends on the Dylan plans and the breadth
and depth of the tools and utilities/libraries that
come with it (and its rapid availability for the PPC!).
Considering the amount of code that would have to be ported
by people like us, it's a bit scary.  There would be
pressure to build some porting tools, MCL --> Dylan, 
but then, what better languages to use to manipulate
languages!

The people who have talked about being forced to shift 
their future plans to Lisp on Unix are doing the only 
realistic thing they can at the moment (other than 
going to C/C++/Unix), because Dylan isn't here yet.
It's too bad that Fleischman felt forced to say something
about MCL futures without being able to balanace it with
a positive Dylan announcment -- but Dylan is not an announced
product -- only some kind of a project inside Apple.
Oh, the fickleness of timing!

(The greatest tragedy would be if MCL *and* Dylan were dropped;
that would be about the studpidest move I can imagine.)

"It's exciting to watch the inexorable march of technology,
moving forward with strength and speed -- but it leaves
some broken bodies behind."
                             Apropos Noone


-- 
Prof. Robert P. Futrelle | Biological Knowledge Lab, College of CS
Office: (617)-373-2076   | Northeastern University, 161CN
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