Cleaning up a world...

[dp@dsp.analog.com (Jeff Del Papa)]

    Date: Sun, 16 Feb 1992 17:58 EST
    From: Think.COM!barmar@dsp.analog.com (Barry Margolin)

       Date: Sun, 16 Feb 92 14:35 PST
       From: Scott_Busse%mindlink.bc.ca@Warbucks.AI.SRI.COM (Scott Busse)

       Is there an easy way to remove things from a world?

    No easy way.  The hard way is to unintern the symbols that name the
    functions, variables, flavors, etc. that you don't want, and also remove
    the corresponding objects from whatever data structures they're in (for
    instane, there's a table of all the flavors, used by completion).  Garbage
    collection might be smart about cleaning up these tables, though, but you'd
    have to check on a case-by-case basis.

The GC does do a good job (assuming you use Full GC, and save a complete world),
if you are persistent, you can even kill an entire package. I don't reccomend it
tho.

    Symbolics must have solved some of these problems, though.  They have
    delivery-only worlds that don't have some of the large packages such as
    Zmail.

In this case, I think they build the world without loading the extra gubbish
(years ago I remember getting the TI "Cold Load" worlds to build an
application on top of...) - They are on the standard CDROM, so starting there is
likely a better idea.

<dp>