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Re: A Dylan implemented on Common Lisp



In article <1995Mar6.221932.28468@franz.com> kem@prl.ufl.edu (Kelly Murray) writes:

   In article <3jdh0j$ib4@news.internex.net>, yost@rclsgi.eng.ohio-state.edu (Dave Yost) writes:
   >> It would seem to me to be a very worthy university project to
   >> build a portable Dylan implementation on top of Common Lisp.

And a very worthy university has done this, sort of.  The Gwydion
project's first toy implementation of Dylan was on top of CMU CL, with
which we have some familiarity.  This was back when Dylan had a
Lisp-like syntax, so that wasn't a problem, but there were enough
small differences to make the resulting Dylan-ish system pretty
unusable for development of real Dylan code.  We decided to abandon
this effort in favor of Mindy.  The () vs. #f issue was one nasty
problem we ran into. I don't remember all the others, but there were a
bunch of them.

   If the CL->Dylan mapping isn't 100%, maybe we could
   push hard to get Dylan changed so it would be.  

Push all you like.  It won't happen.  Having a Dylan-in-CL for some
transitional period is not a good enough reason to preserve all the
accumulated small irritations that have built up in Lisp over the
decades.

-- Scott

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