Re: packages with binaries

Stephen J. Turnbull writes: That is good to know. We get demands from users for new functionality, but never complaints about excess functionality. So, if you can give me some samples of what you would consider excessive in the recent VM, that would be helpful. I think there is a more subtle point I am making. There is a distinction I can make along various dimensions, such as: internal vs external textual vs behavioral syntactic vs semantic static vs dynamic representation vs computation Traditional software engineering seems too focused on the first column in these dichotomies (what I called "skin-deep" in my earler message), whereas I think what matters more is the second column. You can see the syntactic structure as soon as you look at a piece of code. To understand its semantic structure, you need to understand its behavior and see what happens when you tweak it. Pretty looking pieces of code can fall apart at the simplest of tweaks. Having good syntactic structure doesn't mean that the code is logically coherent. VM, on the other hand, has logical coherence that continues to stand up when we tweak it. In the long run, that is what makes the code easy to maintain and modify. (Of course, nobody would complain if it had good syntactic structure too. But that is not the key criterion, as I see things now.) Cheers, Uday _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://lists.xemacs.org/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta