belmonte@svax.cs.cornell.edu (Matthew Belmonte) (10/10/86)
[E A T M E.............]
recently i spent an evening going through mounds & mounds of Symbolics's
Zmacs code in an eventually successful attempt to find a way to bind a
Zmacs key to a user-written lisp function, bypassing the
ZWEI:DEFINE-KEYBOARD-MACRO routine. it occurs to me that such
modifications/additions to Symbolics's own code would be much less painful if
Symbolics had included documentation on it. Bravo, Symbolics, for handing out
your source --
the only problem w/ it is that internal documentation consists of about
3 lines of very general comments for every set of related functions, & no
descriptions of data structures. You already have about 10 good manuals for
the machine. How about "11: System Software Implementation"?
("Oh, yes, it's another $40000 for the manuals.":-)
--
Matthew Belmonte
ARPA:
<belmonte@rocky.cs.cornell.edu>
<belmonte@svax.cs.cornell.edu>
BITNET:
<d25y@cornella>
<d25y@crnlvax5>
UUCP:
..!decvax!duke!duknbsr!mkbcpr0@bunny.UUCP (C. Rosebrugh) (10/13/86)
In article <588@svax.cs.cornell.edu>, Matthew Belmonte (..!decvax!duke!duknbsr!mkb writes): > recently i spent an evening going through mounds & mounds of Symbolics's > Zmacs code in an eventually successful attempt to find a way to bind a > You already have about 10 good manuals for > the machine. How about "11: System Software Implementation"? > ("Oh, yes, it's another $40000 for the manuals.":-) Welcome to the Lisp Machine Hacker's club, Matt. I suppose that the problem with writing a manual on the software implementation of Zmacs, windows, etc. is that Symbolics would have to somewhat support that implementation across new releases. that means lotso money and time (i.e. resources). If you continue using the LM as a development tool, you'll undoubtedly be digging into the window system, as well as the menu system, mouse control, and even more into customizing Zmacs. Without system source code this probably would not be possible. The fact is, it's a mess under there. I suspect that by not supporting manuals on the underlying datastructures, Symbolics will be able to "easily" clean some of this stuff up - as time marches on - and not have to worry about customers whining about changes. It's interesting to note how the new release (Genera) attempts to raise the level even higher (i.e. by using Frame-up for window/pane design, SemantiCue for mouse control, and Dynamic Windows for output control). Because of the amount of customizing we've done here (over 1.5 years worth), I hope the foundation is the same as with release 6. Of course they say it is... (except for CL compatability changes), but one never really knows, eh? Christopher Rosebrugh, GTE Labs, Waltham, Mass. ...!harvard!bunny!cpr0