Re: Y Store now C++

[Geoffrey Knauth <address@hidden>]

On Monday, February 24, 2003, at 11:55 PM, Daniel Weinreb wrote:

>> So what are the hacks that constrain you in Common Lisp -- that you
>> couldn't fix within the language?
> Having separate "value cells" and "function cells" (to use the "street 
> language" way
> of saying it) was one of the most unfortuanate issues. We did not want 
> to break
> pre-existing programs that had a global variable named "foo" and a 
> global function
> named "foo" that were distinct.

Why didn't this have a command-line switch such as 
`--value-function-cells' for the behavior you sometimes needed, that 
you could turn on or off depending on how hackish you needed to be?  
I'm thinking of all the GCC switches to enable this-or-that 
compatibility for archaic or broken programs.

It's seems odd that the whole language got a reputation for being 
hacked, when the key hacks could have just had on/off switches.

Or did you indeed have these switches?  If so, I can't imagine you 
could ever get rid of them, just as you could never get all C programs 
to compile with GCC without compatibility toggles.