Zetalisp to Common Lisp conversion routines

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

I am interested in your comments on the conversion tools that
were released with 7.1.  See the document "Zetalisp to Common
Lisp conversion routines", which is not available online.  I'd
like to hear from people who have used these tools, whether you
have bug reports, suggestions for improvements, or even praise.
I would also like to hear from people who did not use these tools
if you considered using them but found some reason why you could
not.  I would particularly like to hear comments from anyone who
has built their own conversion sets for doing other types of
source-to-source conversion on top of the mechanisms provided
(but not documented) in these tools.  Comments are welcome on the
particular conversion sets provided, other conversion sets you'd
like to see, and the underlying substrate.

For those unfamiliar with the conversion tools, they are a
separately loadable system, named Conversion-Tools, distributed
with Genera, that extends the editor to perform source-to-source
conversion.  The tools include conversions from Zetalisp to
Symbolics Common Lisp, built on a more general substrate that
allows conversions to be defined as matching one list structure
and constructing a new list structure, very much like DEFMACRO,
yet makes the actual changes in the editor buffer not by reading
and printing, but in a cleverer way that avoids losing comments,
indentation, and other formatting.

I am interested in exploring how these tools can be improved into
a more general, but easy-to-use, mechanism for arbitrary
source-to-source conversions, especially including user-defined
conversions.  None of this is a commitment at this time for any
kind of released product.  At present I am just exploring the
possibilities, and I would like to know what you, the experienced
long-time users, think about this area.