macsyma and common-lisp

["George J. Carrette" <GJC@MIT-MC.ARPA>]

I've heard that one too many times. Certainly it was even mentioned by
people at some of the early CL meetings that "we cant do X because of
programs like Macsyma," but that has certainly proved not the case.
When it comes to a program the size of DOE-Macsyma at least yours truly
takes the minimum work route, SHADOW EVERYTHING IN SIGHT! Keep my own
private copies of the maclisp-compatible functions because you know
you cant trust the quality (speed or accuracy) of things supposedly
done for maclisp compatibility in some of the more popular
lisp/operating-system environments. And then parts of DOE-macsyma depend
heavily on the dynamic scoping in the maclisp interpreter, and I tell
you that was a pain.

In fact, I remember a very specific statement about (SYMBOLP ()) = T,
in the early CL meetings: "we cant change that because of programs
like Macsyma" Unfortunately the facts didnt seem to matter when I
replied that Macsyma had already been brought up in NIL (which at the
time had a more rational/orthogonal type scheme) and that the fact
that (SYMBOLP ()) was now FALSE and (GET () 'ANYTHING) was now an
error had uncovered some bugs that had escaped tracking down for
years. The proof of actual experience of porting a large system to
what at the time was the post-maclisp dialect pointing to common-lisp
did not in fact matter. (Or as Hitler once said, "How many [army] divisions
does the Pope have?").

So lets not entertain any further mention of things for the benefit of
Macsyma.