Re: [Axiom-developer] Re: libaxiom.a

[Ralf Hemmecke]

On 03/21/2006 04:55 PM, Page, Bill wrote:
> Tim, 
>
> On Tuesday, March 21, 2006 11:00 AM you wrote:
> > ... 
> > AXIOMsys has a large set of libraries. These libraries
> > can't be compiled and executed standalone because they
> > assume the underlying lisp (grep for $Lisp in the algebra
> > sources).

> Very true.

I grep'ped for $Lisp. Well, that makes 2568 occurrences and for my 
tasted a very bad design. Wouldn't it be much better to concentrate all 
the Lisp dependencies in just a few modules and write the rest depending 
on that modules in Aldor?

For example, I see "NIL$Lisp" all over the place (153 times). Brrrhh. 
Wouldn't just "nil" do? And to be honest, I mostly wouldn't like to see 
NIL at all. Aldor/SPAD should deal with domains and their elements and 
mostly forget about a pointer view. There would be only rare reasons to 
use NIL and they should be abstracted through an Aldor Pointer domain 
(which then could be mapped to Lisp (or whatever)).

Except that we now have this Lisp'ish SPAD code for historical reasons, 
I think it would be much cleaner to make a clear cut between the 
underlying Lisp infrastructure and the Algebra code.

Is my view so wrong (except that it means lots of work)?

Ralf