The solution that was put into macsyma was to have "autoload" properties
on function names such that the first invocation of a function
lead to the loading of the correct file. Setting up the autoload
properties required a pretty good path to the right file.
the reason there were file directories like share, share1, share2,
sharem, ...
was that the ITS timesharing system on which Macsyma was built
had
1. A non-hierarchical file system. Each user had a single-level
directory.
2. There was a limit to the number of files each directory could
contain, hence we made up new USERS with directories. SHARE1
was another user!! ITS had no password protection.
You may ask how could this be possible? Imagine the year
is 1968. All your personal files are on removable storage.
The disk files are working space only. All the users together
have about 10 megabytes.
Maybe less.
So don't put too much importance on the original organization!
there is an ANSI common lisp pathname search mechanism already.
Can that be used?
RJF
James Amundson wrote:
> I surrender. We will fix the searching to look in all the
> subdirectories. Since we are only fixing bugs before the release, I just
> made it a bug. (Any new issues that need to be changed before the
> release should go into the bug reporting system.)
>
> --Jim
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