Re: LispM Market Share

["Eric A. Raymond" <raymond%ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov@RELAY.CS.NET>]

>This has got to be one of the most frustrating things about the
>Symbolics for me.  The symbolics may not be an inherently slow machine
>but compared to a sparcstation (or even my amiga :-) it gives the feel
>of being quite sluggish (disk i/o, keyboard response in certain
>situations, changing windows, etc. etc.).  Of course, I use a Connection
>Machine so I'm not used to waiting around unless I *really* have to ;-).

Yup.  Give it some zip.  Symbolics seemed to trade most of this off
in the name of flexability.  How about a TURBO fn key which forces certain
actions to be quick (i.e., window ops, presentation selection) at the
expense of a little bit of consistency (which would be updated in the
background as it always does).  Then again, have you ever looked
through some of the source?


>benefit from a line-by-line single-step debugger like (oooh I hate to

You can step top level forms with the (step (&body forms)) expression.
Not exactly waht you had in mind.  There is also some of this
capability built into the window debugger (but not really) and the
trace package.  It's amazing how a machine which is so highly praised
for it's development environment can get by with minimal source level
debugging. This issue has been raised again and again.  Folks at
Symbolics keep on saying that this is a favorite area they'd like to
work on, but they have to do X, Y, and Z first.
-- 
Eric A. Raymond  (raymond@ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov)
G7 C7 G7 G#7 G7 G+13 C7 GM7 Am7 Bm7 Bd7 Am7 C7 Do13 G7 C7 G7 D+13: Elmore James