MacIvory conversion experience

[barmar@THINK.COM]

   Date: Sun, 19 Feb 89 16:33 EST
   From: Greenwald@stony-brook.scrc.symbolics.com (Michael Greenwald)

       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.  

   As Moon said, the change wasn't completely gratuitous.

I never accused it of being gratuitous.  I assumed right away that
there had to be a very good reason for this change, as it must have
required lots of changes in your software, too.

   When you use SI:ADVISE-PERMANENTLY with compiled advice, then the
   symbols SELF and SYS:SELF-MAPPING-TABLE are bound inside the body of the
   advice.

Although I generally use compiled advice in all my patches, I'd rather
not write code that is dependent on it, so I don't think I'll make use
of this feature.  For now I'll use the TMC-SELF-ARG subst I wrote.

   The right fix isn't to write your own function, but to patch
   SI:ENCAPSULATION-LAMBDA-LIST instead.  I'll submit a patch for this for
   7.4.  I don't guarantee that it will pass patch-review.  

Is that because the 7.4 freeze deadline is coming up?  I certainly
can't believe it would fail for technical reasons.  Or do they
discourage installing fixes to unsupported features (I can understand
discouraging the work, but if it's already done...)?

Thanks for the info, though.

						barmar