MacIvory conversion experience

["David A. Moon" <Moon@SCRC-STONY-BROOK.ARPA>]

    Date: Fri, 17 Feb 89 17:30 EST
    From: barmar@Think.COM (Barry Margolin)
    
    One problem that has surprised me, though, is that Symbolics changed the
    order of the implicit arguments to flavor methods.  On 3600's the first
    two arguments to methods are SELF and SYS:SELF-MAPPING-TABLE, but on the
    Ivory they are in the opposite order.

In case you thought this was a gratuitous change, it wasn't.  It was done
for rather subtle hardware reasons and is part of what allowed us to
increase the speed of function call on Ivory by roughly a factor of 5 over
the 3600 (best case on both machines).

You're quite right that we need to fix function encapsulation to provide
a more abstract interface so you don't have to depend on this implementation
detail.  If you have any ideas for good ways to do this we'd like to hear them.