Re: scheme - my opinion

Hrvoje> I think both [CL and Scheme] specify characters as Hrvoje> strings, as you surely guessed. Stephen> Another example: I just recalled from CLtL1 that (eq ?a ?a) need not Stephen> be true (for efficiency reasons, they might be implemented as Stephen> immediate operands in some machine languages). If this is still true Stephen> under Standard CL, we have to rip out any such comparisons of Stephen> characters. Ebola mutates and lives.... No. Although (eq #\a #\a) need not always be true, I suspect that standard allows it to be so. We can surely make it so for XEmacs and still be conforming. Besides, ANSI CL still has (char-equal #\a #\a) if you really want to be portable. Stephen> One of the advantages of the small Scheme engine is that the engine Stephen> itself is more likely IMO to remain separately-maintainable than a Stephen> large CL engine which will probably (IMO, again) need many small Stephen> XEmacs-specific changes as time goes on. While I would prefer ANSI CL, I think the maintenance of such a thing is problematic at best. CLISP is maintained primarily by one person (Bruno), and, perhaps 2-3 others, from looking at the mailing lists. This is a major disadvantage. Guile, I assume, has really active development and quite a few major contributors. This is a major plus if you really want a separately maintained core. As an aside, if you want to see what xemacs in lisp might look like, take a peek at hemlock that comes with cmucl. It's a pseudo-emacs written entirely in lisp. It's usuable, and I think some people do use it as their editor. Hemlock is probably at the level of an 18.x emacs, but runs on X. Ray