Re: [Axiom-developer] Re: A modest proposal

[C Y]

--- Stephen Wilson <address@hidden> wrote:

> No one, to my knowledge, is rewriting noweb or some equivalent in
> Lisp.

He's referring to cl-web, I believe.  That can be viewed as a
functional replacement for noweb in Lisp, although it does not support
all of noweb's features.  It is a requirement for asdf-literate to be
able to handle pamphlet files.  In theory I could write a lisp routine
that calls noweb every time (I have a test script I used for
comparisons which did something of the sort) but it seemed to me that
the better solution for portability and simplicity within the Lisp
environment was to have the abilities native.  As a bonus, Waldek
provided a finite-state based solution that appears to be faster at the
tangle operation than noweb - but that's not the primary benefit for
me.
 
> > I cannot imagine that spending time extending asdf to understand
> > pamphlet format will be anything but a similar diversion. The
> result
> > of all this effort is just to build a bigger ghetto in which Axiom
> > will eventually die... :-(
> 
> Not sure what to say about that.  There are technical reasons why
> asdf is a reasonable direction to pursue.  I have no idea what you
> mean by `ghetto'.

If I understand correctly from previous posts, in this context "ghetto"
is being used to describe a large body of tools that are divorced from
mainstream directions being taken by the open source community. 
Centering on Lisp already triggers some of those complaints, and Bill's
concern (if I understand correctly) is that if we home-grow too much we
will end up not being able to grow with the open source world and be
left behind with a bunch of non-standard tools no one wants to take the
time to understand.

Obviously I disagree that this is what will happen - Lisp I don't
regard as a ghetto and ASDF is the standard solution within the Lisp
world.  It seems to be well designed and flexible.  And the goal is to
develop tools such that given a working Lisp environment users and
developers will be able to focus on the Algebra without worrying about
the underlying tools.  If they MUST work with them, I would like them
to be literate all the way down - no dark corners to get into trouble
with.  But that's again just me.

Cheers,
CY


       
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