Re: compute-system-path needs a call to string to accept keywords for module-name.

John Foderaro <[email protected]> Thu, 12 Feb 2004 08:31:02 -0800
Newsgroups gmane.lisp.clocc.general
Message-ID <[email protected]>
>> You can have it both ways, (a) or (b)
>> 
>> 	(symbol-name 'cl:car) ==> "CAR"
>> 
>> or
>> 
>> 	(symbol-name 'cl:car) ==> "car"
>> 
>> What you want is
>> 
>> 	(find-symbol "cAr") ==> #S(SYMBOL :NAME <"CAR" or "car" or "Car" or 
>> ... > :package "CL")
>> 


You keep bring up find-symbol.  At this point I don't care about find-symbol.
All I want to know is what symbol-name returns.  It's a string
and I might want to use that string to create other strings.
Are you saying that my program can't know what symbol-name returns
since that depends on the package name case and if I'm writing
some utility function I can't know ahead of time what the package-name-case 
of each package will be when this function is loaded in to lisp?

>> (note: no dynamic 
>> *package-symbol-name-case* available)

are you saying that you have to decide the package-symbol-name-case
at system build time? 
In that case you're going to have to either have it set to make
ANSI code that you might want to import happy or you're going
to have to have two images (which is the thing about the ACL solution
that you don't like).  Either way you can't get by with exactly
one Modern image.

I may have misunderstood things because again I haven't seen
the whole proposal.



>> ... and I still am wondering what were you guys thinking while writing 
>> the standard (you were there, weren't you?) :)

This is a sensitive subject to me.  I argued strongly for a
Modern Lisp (though it wasn't called Modern then).
At the time we had Franz Lisp which was a Modern Lisp yet it
was able to make use of large libraries of ANSI-type code (including
Macsyma) without changing a line of the imported code.  
So there was no issue of leaving Lisp code behind if we looked
ahead and saw that Modern mode was the wave of the future.

However the case-insensitive crowd won and I can't say why
without disparaging a few people who are still around and I 
don't want to do that.  




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