| The kook here is you, and I can prove it: you have a bizarre view that developers should be divided into political parties based on programming language, and code strictly to the party lines. Bizarre views make the kook. TXR does need its own dialect of Lisp because Common Lisp isn't suitable for slick data munging: not "out of the box", without layering your own tools on top of it. This is a separate question from what TXR is written in. Even if TXR were written using SBCL, it would still have that dialect; it wouldn't just expose Common Lisp. That dialect is sufficiently incompatible that it would still require writing a reader and printer from scratch, and a complete code walker to implement the evaluation rules of the dialect. Not to mention a reimplementation of most of the library. The dialect has two kinds of cons cells, so we couldn't use the host implementation's functions that understand only one kind of cons cell. So, whereas some things in TXR Lisp could be syntactic sugar on top of Common Lisp, with others it is not so. Using SBCL would have many advantages in spite of all this, but it would also reduce many opportunities for me to do various low-level things from scratch. I don't have to justify to anyone that I feel like make a garbage collector or regex engine from scratch. So, the reasons for not using "SBCL" have nothing to do with "good enough". It's simply about "not mine". TXR is a form of Lisp advocacy. TXR is also (modest) Lisp research; for instance I discovered a clean, workable way to have Lisp-1 and Lisp-2 in the same dialect, so any Lispers who are paying attention can stop squabbling over that once and for all. It pays to read this: http://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/HOPL2-Uncut.pdf Why we have Lisp today with all the features we take for granted is that there was a golden era of experimentation involving different groups working in different locations on their own dialects. For example, the MacLisp people hacked on MacLisp, and it wasn't because Interlisp wasn't good enough for them. Or vice versa. That experimentation should continue. |
Kaz, the C programming language isn't yours either. My point is that Common Lisp is supposed to be a general purpose programming language with power far greater than a primitive language like C, but you chose to implement TXR in C simply because C makes it much easier for you to accomplish your goal than Common Lisp. I'm just trying to point out the obvious, which nobody from c.l.l. seems willing to admit.