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From: malcolm@spar.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: lisp environments summary
Message-ID: <323@spar.SPAR.SLB.COM>
Date: Mon, 7-Dec-87 15:47:33 EST
Article-I.D.: spar.323
Posted: Mon Dec  7 15:47:33 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 12-Dec-87 18:55:22 EST
References: <613@umbc3.UMD.EDU> <325@siemens.UUCP>
Reply-To: malcolm@spar.UUCP (Malcolm Slaney)
Organization: SPAR - Schlumberger Palo Alto Research
Lines: 20
Keywords: Interlisp, Editing, Files
Summary: Interlisp is not perfect (editing files)

In article <325@siemens.UUCP> steve@siemens.UUCP (Steve Clark) writes:
>  The correct way to deal with files and storing your lisp code is
>  essentially the way Interlisp does it.  You edit your functions
>  in Lisp, and when you want to save them you write them out to files.

Perhaps this works well for pure Xerox users but I spent last week porting
some software that already runs on Symbolics and Suns to a Xerox machine
and found it didn't work.

The most fundamental problem is that our code has a number of #+ and #- 
constructs to fix shortcomings/differences in the different versions of lisp.  
If we read the definining file into the Interlisp environment we lost all 
but the conditionals that were appropiate for the Xerox machine.  This really 
makes it hard to write code that must run on other machines.

Our solution was to edit the files (using a nearby MAC) on the file server
and then reread the files into Interlisp.  Not a good solution.   I was
told that there were no text editors available in the Interlisp environment.

								Malcolm