Common Lisp as a substrate for XEmacs
(This contains stuff shamelessly ripped off from posts by Reggy
Perry, Bruno Haible, Hrvoje Niksic, and Lars Ingebrigtsen without
explicit attribution. That doesn't mean anything here reflects
their opinions at all.)
Here's a list of Common Lisp
implementation candidates advocated by people on
xemacs-beta.
Pros
- Emacs Lisp is a MacLisp variant and Common Lisp is
designed with the explicit intent to easily migrate maclisp
programs to common lisp.
- Common Lisp has structures, objects, and generic functions
so that you can generalize a lot of common code that is probably
laying around.
- Packages give you namespace separation so that you can worry
less about name clashes and having to have lots of conventions
to avoid these clashes.
- Common Lisp has powerful exceptions which are CLOS objects
and powerful exception handling semantics which will allow
better handling of exceptional situations have the potential to
make the system very robust.
Cons
- Common Lisp is a very large language. Not just the library
part, pure language syntax, too.
CL has all that stuff to be compatible with legacy code in
InterLisp, MacLisp and what not---that's how it was designed.
- Free implementations of CL usually don't implement the full
standard.
Michael Sperber [Mr. Preprocessor]
Last modified: Wed Jul 15 08:53:39 MST 1998