Subject: binary .fas (Was: compile-file & *print-pretty*)

From: Joerg Hoehle <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1999 00:51:53 +0200 (MET DST)

Hi,

Raymond Toy <[email-masked]> wrote:
> Do people actually hand-edit fas files or process them in any way
> other than creating them via Clisp?  Just curious.  I've always
> treated them as binary files.

I've done so in the past.  I copied system::REMOVE-OLD-DEFINITION and
some little more from init.fas to another .fas file, possibly
tests/tests.fas.  The effect was that I had a self-contained .fas file
that I could load from lisp.run without using -M lispinit.mem.

So I could execute some tests running in compiled mode, e.g. without a
possible interpreter or load/savemem bug or whatever I was hunting.

Another benefit of this technique is that it allows you to get rid of
*.mem, e.g. if you want a really small memory footprint, yet have many
CL features still running because a lot is implemented in C (the
missing features implemented in Lisp you can still copy&paste from
other CLISP *.fas compiled sources with little work).

Regards,
	Jorg Hohle.