Re: Muddy diamonds

[Kent M. Pitman <KMP at MIT-MC>]

Actually, I disagree with the idea of having functions in the system which
do workspace saving, etc. It is much more important that you have the 
primitives you need to build such functions. Maclisp will certainly provide
you with that. Fanciness like saving workspaces, etc., are something that 
everyone has personal preferences about. Indeed -- the concept is unthinkable
to me on a conventional machine -- I'd rather not waste my address space on 
it. (I suspect that attitude will change with the advent of larger address
space machines; I certainly don't begrudge the LispM for having Zwei in 
its address space ...) My point is that quite often such packages might want
to be just publicly accessible libraries which people can load if they like
or not if they don't. And such public libraries should be well-advertised
so that people don't waste their effort writing personal hacks to do things
that someone has already done better. On this last point, Maclisp is somewhat
lacking as there has been a marked lack of documentation -- hopefully that
will change one of these days ... And I don't believe in the Interlisp 
philosophy of adding function after function and package after package,
growing seemingly without bound. Pretty soon things do get muddy if you do
things that way. Some day we'll have a lot of experience in how environment
saving, building, and manipulating can best be done -- and at that time it
might rightly be said to be a good thing that it be a property of a language
-- but right now I don't think anyone knows the right way, so I'd just as soon
retain some distinction between the Lisp language itself and the environment
provided by a given Lisp implementation or invocation. APL tries to define
things to rigidly and I think it might be a serious error to follow suit for
the time being ...