Re: Allegro and Sbcl disagree on no-primary-method behavior



Pascal Costanza wrote:
Ken Tilton wrote:



Edi Weitz wrote:

On Thu, 29 May 2008 12:11:53 -0400, Ken Tilton <kennytilton@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


This has been my experience every time in porting from ACL to LW: LW
was compliant, ACL was easier to live with.


ps. I almost followed up with except in re developing a portable library. But as I said, a year's worth of kennycode takes only a day or two to get compiled under LW, and most of that stems from my ignorance of their astonishingly great IDE.



Yep, let's get rid of the fucking standard once and for all. Who
needs it anyway?


Exactly. Then there would be room for experimentation and different implementations could add interesting new extensions... whoa. What is that deja vu feeling I am having?

My understanding from Franz is that they love Mr. Dietz's compliance test (well, in at least one case they invoked it when asked why) but neither are they in the mood to break a lot of customer code (having invoked that at least once, IIRC).

In this case it looks like the standard is just plain wrong if one wants to follow The One True Lisp Way and trust us to know what we are doing, so compliance here would be compliance for it's own sake.


What part of define-method-combination is it that you don't get?

btw, dying is easy, comedy is hard. "...is it that you don't get" is a comedy killer, way too many words for starters. I was astonished and delighted to listen to a long craft interview of Jack Benny in which he talked about his writers and him sitting around trying to eliminate words from jokes even for his TV sitcom dialogue, never mind his stand-up jokes.

You could go with "What part...don't you get?", but one is supposed to practice for years before deviating from the master's example. The preferred form then must be: "What part...do you not understand?"

"get" is too overloaded and indeed the connotation "understand" is a less likely usage, way too much work for the listener's cortex to resolve, a metaphor instead of straight language. We don't want the listeners cortex bogged down in simply understanding the words, we want them flowing along smoothly and effortlessly to have them going as fast as possible when we trip them.

Another thing. The humor comes from asking "what part" but the punch comes from the word "not". When this line is spoken, likewise that is where the emphasis falls. You have contracted the punch line. Oops.

hth,kt

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