Re: LOCALES

[John R Ellis <Ellis@YALE.ARPA>]

    I would like to suggest an alternative to locales as a method of
    dividing up the name space.  You will notice that it is based on Ada
    packages.

I agree that T's current tools do not provide adequate control over
modularity for large systems.  But T does provide enough basic tools for
non-T-implementors to experiment with their own designs.  The design you
suggested could be implemented with existing T tools (possibly with the
use of simple pre-processor).  Given the small amount of experience with
such systems in Lisp environments, it makes much more sense to do a
prototype on top of an existing T first.

I would not recommend as role models languages such as Ada or Japanase
Prolog; they have not yet been used extensively for large applications.
Ada in particular has a number of design misfeatures in its packages,
and its designers remain ignorant of previous experience.

Xerox PARC has had ten years of experience with Mesa and now Cedar.
Hundreds of large programs have been written in Mesa and Cedar.  Numereous
blue&white tech reports discussing various aspects of Mesa have been
published, including a good thesis by Eric Schmidt discussing the
construction of large systems.
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