Re: What are CLISP's "selling" points?

On Thursday, Apr 10, 2003, at 05:15 US/Eastern, Hoehle, Joerg-Cyril 
indited:

> I'm wondering what attracts people to CLISP. Maybe developers could 
> then concentrate efforts on these distinguishing areas.

Portability is a big one, Linux (PPC, x86), MacOS/X, etc.

> ~ perhaps UNICODE, but Allegro seems to have the reputation of The 
> Lisp with excellent unicode support

Unicode would be a big win. Its hard to imagine taking an application 
international without it.

> My bet is people just want the interface stuff to work, so that they 
> can concentrate on the application instead.

Yup. Haven't bothered yet (want too keep cross platform stuff really 
cross platform without porting FFI related Hooey.

> - CLOS/MOP
> Several people (e.g. Tim Bradshaw) were turned away by CLISP's CLOS 
> missing MOP features or other restrictions in CLISP's implementation 
> of CLOS.

So far hasn't been an issue, but at least CLISP will be good enough for 
first pass, proof of concept.

> I cannot propose to do that, since I don't have any need for CLOS+MOP.

Me neither at the moment.

> - GUI - no McClim, no cello, don't know about garnet, ...
> What are CLISP-users using here?

Nothing as of yet. Would like to somehow get Hemlock there, but not so 
badly (yet) to do it myself. Problem is that with extreme portability 
its hard to do much "nice" and I'm personally not willing to make it 
harder to port to get a GUI.

> Your suggestions/ideas are welcome,

Thanks. I've only been using CLISP for a few weeks, but I like that I 
can use the same thing everywhere (OK, I couldn't build 2.30 on Mac 
OS/X myself, but I haven't tried the latest tree ;-) I'm getting use 
from 2.29 ).

-D'gou



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