I'm daydreaming#

Wed, 12 May 2004 18:05:10 +0000

I'm daydreaming. Yesterday I somehow ended up resubscribed to comp.lang.lisp, to participate (well, mostly laugh at) in the "Modernizing Common Lisp" thread. (My fingers seem determined to type that as "Mordorizing"; read into that what you will). Fortunately now I'm not taking it as seriously I find it more entertaining than frustrating. I'm not going to post some long screed about it here, but I did start thinking at a tangent.

Adopting a Nick Hornby writing cliché (which I'm sure he stole from the Mail on Sunday magazine anyway), here are my top five asdf-install-compatible libraries (excluding the ones I wrote). These are not in order of merit, just in the order they occur to me.

1. xmls: I think I'm only using this for xml generation rather than actual parsing, but it's a snap for all those trivial XML formats like RSS.

2. cl-ppcre: on which topic I have written before, yes.

3. pg: although the version I'm actually using predates its asdf-installability (it works, and it's in production, and so I'm naturally reluctant to upgrade it).

4. split-sequence: ok, really, how can I not?

5. clx: kind of stretching a point here in that I asdfized it and host the cvs repository, but the hard work is/was all done by other people.

The common feature in all of these (except CLX, which I stuck in simply because so much else depends on it) is that they're small, do one thing well, and don't impose their way of working on me. Remember, you get ten points for a library, but only two for a framework.

In other news, I read somewhere that the Allegro CL 7.0 beta now includes asdf. I don't know if beta programme participants are bound by NDA or anything, but just in case they are I've conveniently forgotten where I got this news.