[racket-dev] using Racket to build an image-based Lisp: feasible?

10 minutes ago, mikel evins wrote:
> 
> But not having the capability to save and load an image provides no
> advantages. Anything you can do without that capability, you can do
> with it. The reverse is not true.

I'm not going to reply to each of your points (partly because I know
how many of them hold, and partly because it will get tedious and
off-topic...).  But the above is not a fair thing to say: of course on
the face of things you don't lose anything by having an extra feature.

But looking at it more deeply I certainly lose something -- I lose the
ability to use source code for development, which could be a real
problem for me if I'm working on some code with someone remote and all
we have to communicate are binary images.  (Eg, if it's only images,
then what happens when I have (define (add1 x) (+ x 1)) in my image,
and yours has (define (add1 x) (+ x 1.0))?)

And yes, I know that the way to address these things is in the process
-- organizing your snapshots etc -- but on the flip side of that you
have similar things that people use with source-code (like a
repository for source snapshots).

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!