Re: Where do you want to go tomorrow?

sperber(a)informatik.uni-tuebingen.de (Michael Sperber [Mr. Preprocessor]) writes: This is not true -- I have argued for a stripped-down common lisp in the past. Common Lisp is much closer to elisp than any Scheme dialect is. Using Scheme as a primary language in XEmacs will alienate a large number of our contributors, and I, for one, do not want to see that happen. Translators or compatibility packages for elisp implemented in Scheme would of little help, except for porting old code. I doubt anyone will consider using them to write new, XEmacs-specific code. My second argument is that XEmacs has been going in the direction of Common Lisp for several years now. Extensions such as cl.el show that pretty clearly. If we want to extend elisp further, I think we should take a radical step in the same direction, rather than turn into a wholly different one. There is nothing specific to elaborate. All of the points I could possibly bring would be easily met by your experience, so most of it boils down to matter of habit. Suppose the impossible happens, and Erik does come in and does all the work to port XEmacs Lisp to, say, clisp. Would you quit XEmacs development? If yes, why? Now replace Erik with Bruno or Hrvoje. Do the answers change? I think that you are arguing for Scheme because of personal preferences, which is perfectly natural. Your battle plan includes only Scheme-based options, and I think that no words of mine would ever convince you to consider anything else. This is why I think our disagreements can be only settled by a split, or by one of us leaving the development. Either of these things would be very bad, but I don't see another solution -- except for me suddenly falling in love with Scheme, or you with Common Lisp, both of which are unlikely. -- Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic(a)srce.hr&gt; | Student at FER Zagreb, Croatia --------------------------------+-------------------------------- Ask not for whom the <CONTROL-G> tolls.