I'm confused about an eval-when in cl-info.lisp with GCL

On Fri, 2004-07-23 at 10:37, Richard Fateman wrote:
> I don't understand it either, but it seems to me
> that re-defining while  (isn't it standard in CL?) is
> a bad idea if your re-definition is identical to
> the original,

while is a loop keyword in the CL standard. It looks to me like the
macro definition in cl-info is unique.

>   and any conditionalization for the
> "new implementation of lisp"  (NIL) version of Maxima
> probably should just be removed. NIL was written for
> the VAX computer only, and it was never operational
> there.  The NIL conditionalizations were, I suspect, put in the
> source code to make it harder for people to understand
> the code that was released to the Dept. of Energy
> by MIT.

We'll remove at least some of the obsolete conditionalizations in the
next release. There are 181 conditionalizations on nil in the code right
now. There are also 84 on pdp10, 173 on lispm and 68 on multics. That's
not counting things like #+(or cl nil). It will be good too get rid of a
lot of that crud.

--Jim