"Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull(a)sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> writes:
> I am under the impression that to write this stuff to such standards
> is going to be within an order of magnitude of reimplementing the
> Lisp engine in Common Lisp or Scheme. Not as big, but big.
>
> Do you disagree about the scale of the task? I suspect John does.
How have you come to that impression (yes, I disagree about the
scale)? I mean, it's a lot of work, and I don't like the outcome, but
it doesn't look even nearly *that* hard.
> But if not, the Perlmacs patch could end up getting backed out, as
> ImageMagick did, if his goals aren't congruent with the mainline.
> He'd be asked to do most of the work, since most (I think it is safe
> to say) current developers are unsympathetic to the project. It
> would be unfair if it basically came down to John being asked to
> clean up lots of devilish details and obscure crashes, and that
> wasn't what he had in mind.
It's not only up to me, but John sounds like he knows what he's
talking about. If he has good code to show up with, I don't see a
*practical* reason not to include it (I do have philosophical
objections, but then again, people had philosophical objections
against the Windows port...)
> My impression is that John is looking for maximum Perl capability
> for the implementation effort (quite rightly by itself, of course),
> is willing to trade off rare crashes for immediate power (his
> reaction was "it works well for me"), and doesn't think that the
> implicit `(require 'perl-stuff)' scenario is show-stoppingly
> important (his initial reaction was "it's the Lisp programmer's
> problem").
Uhm, I guess we got different impressions... I don't know, really.
