Re: More On Impenetrable Images

[bill (Bill St. Clair)]

At 10:45 AM 9/22/94 +0000, Steve Casner wrote:
>        Reply to:   More On Impenetrable Images
>> Look at the BinHex example in the file "ccl:examples;binhex;binhex.lisp".
>
>This is a rather low-level answer to very high-level question.  I know that
>the wizard developers of MCL x.0 are not responsible for positioning and
>promoting MCL in the marketplace, and that this question should probably be
>put to management directly.  It's probably worth posing here also.  This is
>not a flame, just an idea, offered by many others before, whose time has
>probably arrived.  Here goes:
>
>Suppose I was trying to convince a senior vice president of the world's
>largest airplane manufacturer that MCL x.0 and Macintosh were viable
>platforms to build the next generation of airline industry computer-based
>trainers (486, C++, and Authorware now totally dominate the industry).  I
>talk about the promise of intelligent tutoring, student modeling, contextual
>help and how these emerging technologies have literally been founded on Lisp.
> His curiosity aroused, he, along with a staff of well-seasoned and
>terrifyingly critical technical people, start asking questions like:  Can you
>deliver stable, secure, and serious application-grade software in Lisp?  Will
>our proprietary aircraft performance data, or student pilot progress data be
>at risk?  EVEN IF all the answers are contained in the file: 
>"ccl:examples;binhex;binhex.lisp", printing out a copy for him probably won't
>convince him.

Agreed. I gave a low level answer because I though you were asking how to
do it, not how to convince a manager that it was well supported.

Our internal MCL 3.0 sources have a "Save Application..."
menu item as part of the Interface Toolkit. This automates hiding
the Listener, has three choices for error handling (error dialog,
Listener, or quit), and provides all the parameters to MCL's
save-application function. For your application, you'd probably
want a way to remove or scramble all the symbol names as well,
not hard, but something noone has ever asked for before.

This "Save Application..." dialog is NOT part of the shipping
MCL 2.0.1.