MacIvory conversion experience

[Michael Greenwald <Greenwald@SCRC-STONY-BROOK.ARPA>]

    Date: Sun, 19 Feb 89 22:08:02 EST
    From: 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.  

       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 patch that I submitted works in both interpreted and compiled cases.
I didn't send that to the mailing list, because it took more than a 1
sentence explanation.

       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?  
Partially.  Also, partially for the reason I cite below, and finally,
because I am generally hesitant to predict the future.
							    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...)?

Well, this won't be documented or supported, so the perceived benefit is
nil, additionally, any change has some probability of introducing a bug.
It's late in the 7.4 release cycle, so the change might be viewed as
potentially too dangerous.  

    Thanks for the info, though.

						    barmar