questions and comments

[Steve Olson <olson@juliet.ll.mit.edu>]

Hi folks.  Thanks for making this software available to the public.
I have not used it enough to have uncovered any bugs in the Lisp itself,
but naturally I have some questions, comments, and complaints.

- The first application I tried to port to CMU Lisp was unsucessful because
  I was using a structure as a CLOS class.  This does not work because PCL
  does not support this.  However, there are patches on parcftp.xerox.com 
  that (claim to) give this capability to PCL.  Unfortunately, the patches 
  appear to be specialized for Lucid and KCL.  Are there any plans to get this
  to work for CMU Lisp?

  I do not have knowledge of the internals of either PCl or CMU Lisp,
  so I would not be able to do this myself.  However, I would be willing
  to Beta test it.

- Some of the packages do not appear to have the nicknames claimed by the
  user documentation.  Specifically, PCL is not given the nickname "CLOS".
  (The doc also implies that CLOS is the real name and PCL is the nickname.)

- 9 Meg is a lot to FTP all at once.  It would make for easier FTP-ing if
  the tar files were broken up into 1 Meg pieces.

- 20 Meg is a huge image.  Is there any way to get a smaller image
  with some of the modules stripped out?

- Can an image be built from the sources?  Is it intended that we be able to
  do so?  There is no build documentation, but in the sources there is a
  directory with several promising looking shell and lisp scripts.

- I have found an apparent bug with the generation of ldb/Makefile.
  When cpp is run, all the filenames in the dependancy section that have
  the substring "sparc" in their names get mangled.

- There seems to be a circular dependancy between ldb/lisp.h and ldb/ldb.map
  that causes bootstrapping problems.  How do I get around this problem?

- The name "sun4c_41" sort of implies that it only runs on SparcStations 
  running SunOS 4.1.  However, the binaries seem to work on a Sun 4/260
  running SunOS 4.0.3.  Are there any hidden pitfalls and can I expect this
  to state of affairs to continue?

- This is irritating

* (setq x 1)

Warning: This variable is undefined:
  X

1

--
-- Steve Olson
-- MIT Lincoln Laboratory
-- olson@juliet.ll.mit.edu
--