From ...
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Subject: Re: Labels & flet in defmacro; texts on defmacro; packages
Date: 1999/03/20
Message-ID: <3130918301850501@naggum.no>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 456868368
References: <36F2E626.3D43@isomedia.com>
mail-copies-to: never
Organization: Naggum Software; +47 8800 8879; http://www.naggum.no
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp

* Steve Long <stevelong@isomedia.com>
| (1) Does the defmacro support the use of labels or flet?

  why do you think it doesn't?

| (2) What are the best texts on the use of defmacro (based on
| explanations and examples)?

  Paul Graham: On Lisp.

| (3) I've seen a LISP object-oriented system (not CLOS) that seems to
| create a separate package for every "object template" (it also clobbers
| defmethod, which is really annoying). Does anyone think that there is 
| potentially a large penalty to defining very many packages (say, 5000)?

  a common implementation of the package system is to use lists for the
  use-list and further to separate external and internal symbols into two
  hash tables.  this means that as the number of packages on the use-list
  grows, so does the number of lookups necessary to find a symbol.  the
  penalty for this linear behavior would occur at read-time, however, and
  is probably not important at run-time.

#:Erik