While googling, I came across this paper from 1992
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=161213.161256
Did the source code ever become public, or is there a public convertor
from Flavors message passing to CLOS?
--
There are no average Common Lisp programmers
Reply-To: email is ignored.
--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com
On Mar 17, 11:58 pm, GP lisper <········@CloudDancer.com> wrote:
> While googling, I came across this paper from 1992
>
> http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=161213.161256
>
> Did the source code ever become public, or is there a public convertor
> from Flavors message passing to CLOS?
I've used Flavors via the ICAD syntax (which uses Allegro Common Lisp)
for years. ICAD is an unparalleled productivity tool that relies on
lazy evaluation and provides excellent geometry generation tools
(surfaces and solids in particular). It was created by Concentra,
which became KTI, and was bought by Dassault Systemes. It is an
essential tool at Boeing and Airbus.
If you understand the object oriented paradigm, the ICAD/ACL
documentation gives a hint at how Flavors works. The principal
addition ICAD brings to the Lisp language is the defpart macro and the
clobbering of "the". It seems to share some of the concepts of CLOS.
I wanted something that behaved in a similar fashion to the ICAD
enviro in MCL from Digitool -- the simple "class" definition syntax,
self-referencing properties (called attributes) , and a clearly
defined product-structure tree that accepts and reacts to incremental
attribute modification. I was able to do some of this in a day, using
CLOS, though not with all of the bells and whistles of ICAD. Some of
it is a little messy (well, very messy), but it works. In the end,
it's getting the work done and getting paid for it that counts.
Long story short, if there is no conversion application (Flavors to
CLOS) then it is not a huge task to convert the functionality of a
Flavors-based application to a CLOS-based application.