Re: Garnet, CMUCL & Debian

Vladimir Sedach <[email protected]> writes:

> Hi,
> 
> Sorry for taking so long to reply. I think the one thing that KR lacks

Finals, eh?

> compared to CLOS that nothing else can make up for is multimethods
> (multiple dispatch, generic functions, or whatever you want to call
> them) and method combination. This is related to the fact that KR
> doesn't (and probably won't for most implementations) fit into the
> Common Lisp type system. I actually don't even care that much for the

While I *am* new to Lisp, not a CS 'type', and have only just started
Sonya Keene's CLOS book (plus I haven't even looked at the KR code),
but how can something written in Lisp not fit in to the type system?

Would I be right in thinking that what you mean is that since KR
objects aren't Lisp/CLOS types that they can't be specialized on by
CLOS (for dispatch purposes)?

> rest of CLOS, but generic functions really are the best thing since
> sliced bread. The other thing about CLOS is that you can take

I *have* done a lot of OO programming, and I have to admit I that I am
intrigued by generic functions - they look to be mthods, done right'.

> advantage of multimethods and the Meta-Object Protocol and mix in
> stuff like object persistence (or even constraints :)) into what you
> already have. It looks to me like there would be no way to do this in
> KR without either changing the whole object system or doing it on an
> object-by-object basis, even though slot constraints would probably be
> really helpful for implementing stuff like persistence.
> 
> You can see some rather interesting looking screenshots of Cello at
> Kenny Tilton's webpage (I think also that he made an early preview
> release available but I don't have the link handy).
> http://www.tilton-technology.com/cellophane.html

Looks interesting. :-D

> 
> On another, non-Garnet bashing note, with any luck I will probably
> have Garnet running on top of ECL sometime soon after I am done
> flunking my finals (there are some ECL and CLX pixmap issues that need
> fixing).

I took a look at ECL - is it meant to be linked with other programs,
similar to GNU Guile, the Scheme-based extension language for GNU?

Out of curiosity, why are you porting Garnet as opposed to McCLIM?

Good luck on flunking the finals! ;-)

> 
> Vladimir
> 

Aloha,
+Chris

-- 
We learn from history that we do not learn from history.
-- Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel