[no subject]

[George J. Carrette <GJC at MIT-MC>]

My experience with running macsyma in maclisp and lispm is that what
happens is that compatibility features are not quite compatible, and
that gross amounts of tweeking beyond the scope of a possibility in
FORTRAN 77 goes on. Much of the tweeking takes the form of adding
another layer of abstraction through macros, not using ANY known form
of lisp, but one which is a generalization, and obscure to anyone but
a macsyma-lisp hacker. At the same time the *really* gross old code
gets rewritten, when significant new features are provided, like
Pathnames.

Anyway, in NIL I wanted to get up macsyma as quickly as possible
without grossing out RLB or myself, or overloading NIL with so many
compatibility features, as happened in the Lispmachine. Also there
was that bad-assed T and NIL problem we only talked about a little
at the common-lisp meeting. [However, more severe problems, like the
fact that macsyma would not run with error-checking in CAR/CDR
had already been fixed by smoking it out on the Lispmachine.]