Re: MAKE-INSTANCE and STRUCTURE-CLASS

You know… I’m beginning to see that Common Lisp was never really a grand-plan at all. There were some remarkably clever implementers, but much of the language seems so under-specified.

I was confused (and probably still am) about the nature of the Lisp Reader. Does (SET-MACRO-CHARACTER #\] NIL) cancel the macro nature of the close bracket character?, or not? It seems that in LW it does, but in SBCL it does not. 

So too with STRUCTS. But as I recall, it wasn’t until the late ‘60s, early ‘70s, that “Structured Programming” appeared, and data STRUCTS were invented. Prior to that we had Fortran's parallel arrays of data items.

What keeps me glued to the screen with Lisp is that, among all other languages, Common Lisp has just enough built-in to keep it interesting with forward progress on so many problems I want to tackle. 

The C language would be the next in line, but it asks too much of me - no GC, no dynamic binding, no nesting of functions, etc. But if given a choice at the end of the world, C or anything other than Common Lisp, I would grudgingly accept C.

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