Re: George, take a walk until your hat floats.

[George J. Carrette <GJC at MIT-MC>]

    Date: 26 January 1981 00:19-EST
    From: Alan Bawden <ALAN>

        Date: 25 January 1981 23:29-EST
        From: George J. Carrette <GJC at MIT-MC>

        ...  Does a LOAD on the LISPM really go outside of the language
        and parse what is in a ";" comment? Shouldn't that info be in
        package definitions, or at least be lisp readable in the file?
        With all the language purity and philosophy arguments I hear from
        Lispm people, I really wonder sometimes.

    If we had a file system that would allow us to associate arbitrary
    properties with files (property lists) then we wouldn't have to store
    this information on the first line of the file.  It has nothing to do
    with the LISP language.  Some files start out with a line saying
    "-*-Mode:Text-*-", should that be "lisp readable"?  Take a walk George.

Is this a serious argument? So what if a file says "-*-Mode:Text-*-",
if you LOAD that file does it cause an error message:
"Hey this file is not Mode:Lisp!" to be printed out?
or do you just get a syntax error.

Your filesystem argument assumes a false dilemma, showing that
you didn't read my note very carefully. Convince me that
a mature system needs hacks like these in order to associate
modules with a backpointer to the module class?
Tell me why the lisp environment isn't sufficient to contain
this information.

-gjc