version 15e feedback

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

Hi again folks.  I have gotten a bit deeper into experimenting with CMU CL
then before and I have the following list of comments.  I am using version 
15e, which I compiled myself from source using version 15d as the compiler.


-  I am noticing some problems in the implementation of 'loop'.  CMU CL
   has problems with code like the following.  Some slighly more complex
   examples along the same line in CLtL II also had problems.  Code using 
   'loop' that has worked on Symbolics, Franz Allegro, and Lucid is failing
    in CMU CL.

(defun foo (x) 
  (loop for y in x 
	when y return r))


-  I have not used it extensively, but I was able to drop in the
   "March-92-PCL-1" distribution of pcl and use it in place of the
   CMU supplied PCL without any problems.

-  I see you guys have been working on nicer compile scripts and the like,
   but still are some problems.   In particular, the CMU-o-centric pathnames
   embedded in the scripts required hand editing.

-  Related to the above, ldb/Makefile.boot has a non-standard reference to cpp
   that requires hand-editing.  Similarly, ldb/Makefile needs editing on 
   account of the location of the X include files.  I always found it strange
   that X-specific information is needed in the lisp kernal anyway.

-  I am a bit disappointed that there is not more support for the automatic
   generation of the initial ldb/lisp.h. The method suggested by 
   William.Lott@cs.cmu.edu a while ago does work, but its a bit painful.  
   (Better than the kludge I initialy came up with, though.) 
   I don't undertand why you just don't distribute an initial lisp.h for
   each architecture, but I suppose you must have reasons.  Should I just
   re-use the lisp.h from a build of a previous version --  will lisp.h
   ever change a lot between versions?

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