ceb@ethz.UUCP (Charles Buckley) (12/11/87)
Posting-Front-End: GNU Emacs 18.41.2 of Mon Sep 14 1987 on bernina (berkeley-unix) In article <329@siemens.UUCP> steve@siemens.UUCP (Steve Clark) writes: > I maintain that the non-Interlisp systems are wrong, however. It >is clearly more advanced to treat a file as a database of definitions of >functions, data, structures, etc. than to treat it as a string of characters >that might have been typed at the keyboard. However, since the rest of the >world hasn't caught up yet, there are bound to be incompatibilities. (Character) file storage is simply more flexible. The form in which information is stored must be the most flexible possible, or you lose information. The D-crate's pitching of conditionals is simply the manifestation of this. Proponents of restrictive protocols for information storage really ask "the world" to change to fit the protocol model. In science, models change to fit the data, not the other way round (unless you cheat). To me, browbeating eventual non-conformists into "catching up" by labeling the a model as "advanced" is just a form of negative motivation. All the lousy places I have ever worked ran on negative motivation, none of the good ones. If your model *is* really worth using, and you can communicate its value, you will not need such tactics. Interactively defined functions? Haven't typed one in *years* - that's what scratch buffers are for (in case I want to change a *character* or two, or later save it.). Any mouse-based gadgets you can point to in Interlisp can be recreated for a text editor working on correctly parsed Lisp code. May take execution time, but if this is prohibitive, your function is probably too large.