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Re: kawa goals


On Oct 17, 2010, at 9:45 PM, Per Bothner wrote:

On 10/14/2010 10:08 AM, Jamison Hope wrote:
I know some folks who would like to see a page describing the status
of Common Lisp support, too.

I haven't spent much effort on Common Lisp support recently, though it does inform my design decisions.

That's the impression I had.


 I haven't got
the impression there is a lot of demand - but that may be
a chicken-and-egg problem:  A semi-usable Common Lisp
implementation is a nig job; people needing Common Lisp
aren't going to look at Kawa until it becomes more
feature-complete; OTOH I can't afford to spend a lot of time on
Common Lisp implementation without demand.

Well I personally am a lot more comfortable in Scheme than in Common Lisp, but I have two co-workers who would do everything in CL if they could. (I realize that n=2 doesn't constitute "a lot" of demand.) For now, I suppose I can point them at ABCL if they want to call Java from Common Lisp, but Kawa's foreign function interface (if you'd even call it that) is *much* nicer.


If there were a source
of funding for me to work on Common Lisp support, it would be different,
but I don't know of anything.

Can't help you there, sorry.


I believe Common-Lisp-the-Language first edition is somewhat
doable in a few months of concentrated (full-time) work. A useful "static"
subset of CLOS is probably not that difficult to add, though a complete
implementation including the MOP would be more of challenge.

Probably. As I thumb through the HyperSpec index, it seems (as you'd expect) like a good chunk of the standard CL functions/macros have Scheme analogs, with identical or similar names. So some renaming of existing Kawa identifiers would probably go a long way (map->mapcar, symbol?->symbolp, etc). On the other hand, there are some useful CL constructs which don't have Scheme counterparts, but would be nice to have in Kawa Scheme (like the iteration functions Helmut mentioned the other day). So at least some of the work required for Common Lisp could be viewed as "Scheme enhancements which coincidentally happen to also implement CL features".



Anyway, I still have Annotations higher than "complete ANSI Common Lisp" on my feature request list. Thanks for the update.


-Jamie

--
Jamison Hope
The PTR Group
www.theptrgroup.com




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