Re: is requiring cl bad?

[Helmut Eller]

On Thu, Dec 20 2012, David De La Harpe Golden wrote:

> If emacs ever did go toward adding new facilities in the general area
> of modularity (however unlikely it is in reality in the near future),
> I reckon Ron Garret's common lisp land "lexicons" work [1] might be a
> better "lispy modularity thingy" for emacs lisp to be inspired by than
> common lisp packages in particular.  At least, I'd take a hard look at
> lexicons (and at least glance at what some other languages do), before
> just blindly adding common lisp style packages.

Have you actually taken a "hard look" at Ron Garret's lexicons?  What
was your experience?  I played with them a few years back, but I quickly
concluded that lexicons are only a crude prototype and that it was never
used in the "field"; not something I would use.  Ron Garret's code only
worked with Clozure CL and since then CCL's internals have changed a bit
so that lexicons no longer work.

Common Lisp's packages are not prefect, but they get the job done.  The
problems (and workarounds) are by now well known.

> Emacs lisp is lexically scoped now after all.

If you want Scheme-like modules based on lexical scoping you will also
need hygienic macros.  (Something that Common Lisp nicely avoids.)

Helmut