John, ...[snip]...
re: why doesn't Axiom use autoconf. Poul-Henning Kamp wrote an essay that contains the essence of the reply: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2349257 "Even more maddening is that 31,085 of those lines are in a single unreadably ugly shell script called configure. The idea is that the configure script performs approximately 200 automated tests, so that the user is not burdened with configuring libtool manually. This is a horribly bad idea, already much criticized back in the 1980s when it appeared, as it allows source code to pretend to be portable behind the veneer of the configure script, rather than actually having the quality of portability to begin with. It is a travesty that the configure idea survived." autoconf adds languages like M4, shell scripts, and makefiles. It hardens the shape of the source tree. New versions are released that break old versions. The "new" is added and the "old" is never removed. It is complexity by accretion, black paint over veneer. Axiom's goal has been, and continues to be, removing dependencies. Meta is gone. Boot is gone. Noweb is gone. The directory-based pile-of-sand (POS) is disappearing into books. In the reasonable future C will be gone. Work is underway to build hyperdoc and graphics in the browser (with minimal standards-based javascript/xhtml). Make will be gone as more of the work is merged into lisp. Latex exists with only minimal chunk support macro extensions (a few dozen lines). The eventual goal is Axiom as a literate, common lisp program built using lisp with an optional browser front-end served from lisp. Simplify, simplify... Tim
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