--- "Vadim V. Zhytnikov" <vvzhy@mail.ru> wrote:
> I'm quite happy that this discussion popped up!
> After the thread "set.lisp redefines POWERSET" a while ago
> I was about to propose some ideas about packages in Maxima
> but now I see that other members of the list just
> expressed exactly the same thoughts. Great!
>
> 1). First step is to introduce MAXIMA and MAXIMA-USER
> packages. This is relatively easy to do but immediately
> makes Maxima significantly more robust and resolves
> kill problem.
I agree this sounds good and is a very logical next step.
> 2). Later MAXIMA package must be split on smaller
> packages to make Maxima core clean and modular.
> Ceratanly this is very serious and complicated undertaking
> which requires deep understanding of Maxima core and
> we are not ready to do this now. But in my opinion
> eventually we have do such Maxima core modularization.
Uh - I'm not qualified to comment on this one, although
I will say modular sounds good :-). One concern - if
we do split up MAXIMA into lots of modular packages, how
will kill work? Will it maintain a database of packages
not to kill?
> 3). Maxima desperately needs user-level package system.
> In particular each package in SHARE must form separate
> user package with clean interface. Internally Maxima
> user-level packages may be implemented with the help
> of CL packages. Certainly, this is also not highest
> priority task.
Um - so rather than have loaded share stuff go into MAXIMA-USER
you want to define a new user package for each share file
loaded?
> Finally some other but somewhat related to the
> "kill problem" issue. Right now all packages
> in SHARE remains uncompiled and get installed as
> source code. This seems to be unnatural to me.
Agreed.
> AFAIK all share packages in commercial Macsyma are
> compiled (at least this is true for quite old
> Windows 3.1 Macsyma which I have).
It is true in the newer versions too, IIRC. I dug around
once looking to see what share packages were in the
Macsyma Demo and they were all .o files.
> As far as I remember Richard mentioned that
> not all packages in share could be successfully compiled.
> But this is probably rather exception than general
> rule. This may also depend on the background lisp.
Probably. That issue will be resolved as part of the share
package code cleanup I imagine.
> Eventually I'd like to see all share package in
> compiled form on all lisp platforms but for the
> time being one can modify Maxima make/install
> machinery to compile share packages at least
> selectively. Any opinions?
Personally I think we should wait on that until we have
straightened up the share packages, and then put them
all in at once. What benefits do you see from compiling some
of them?
CY
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