GSOC | Extending Common Lisp support

[Helmut Eller]

* Jamison Hope [2012-05-28 04:48] writes:

> On May 26, 2012, at 3:00 PM, Charles Turner wrote:
>
>> By the way, is DEFMACRO "safe" to use in CL? I remember
>> Per asking users to stop using it in Scheme (which makes sense given
>> the generative facilities there). DEFMACRO appears to work OK for some
>> simple macros, but is it known that DEFMACRO contains some dragons in
>> Kawa?
>
>
> I really don't know. Per?
>
> A related question: How well does Kawa's current implementation of
> defmacro
> conform to the CLHS spec?

The main problem is that Kawa doesn't yet support packages (CL packages,
not Java packages).  Without packages, name collisions are more likely
or in other words: it's harder to safely refer to a global binding.
Kawa's namespace feature can perhaps be used/extended to implement
packages.

Kawa's defmacro also doesn't yet support destructuring, which is quite
useful and often used.  &environment arguments are also missing, but
that's rarely needed.

Helmut