[Axiom-developer] Of possible interest to Axiom

[daly]

Stephen,

(sorry for the delay but I have a major power outage due to Ike,
which will likely last until friday so online time is limited).

Actually I think this is an excellent idea. If there were
defcategory, defdomain, and defpackage macros that could be used
as compile targets it would greatly simplify the spad compiler.
Clever use of defgenerics and class/type connections could produce
very clean code. 

I'd like to see a one-to-one mapping of spad language constructs
to CLOS constructs. It would make it possible to expand the compiler
to handle things like dynamic extends easily. These would be done
with new defgeneric definitions are either compile or runtime. The
underlying lisp system could simply make the magic happen since CLOS
generics can be written at any time.

If the CLOS mappings are defined it becomes possible to unify the
interpreter and compiler. One could even consider playing with the
MOPs to handle add-chain lookups. 

It would even greatly expand the error message and debugging ability
since it would be trivial to add wrappers and whoppers.

So the upsides are cleaner semantic definitions, simpler lisp code,
a clearly defined dynamic extend mechanism, compiler/interpreter
unification, better error and debugging. I'm hard pressed to think
of a downside.

I really like this idea a lot. I want it now. When can I have it? :-)

Tim