Notes on the 4th edition

This document is still far from finished. Future work required includes the following projects.

The preface ought to have a paragraph or two describing the organization of the manual.

The ``language overview'' and ``language principles'' sections need to be expanded. There should be a description of the memory model of objects, in which objects are modeled by pointers into memory.

The form of procedure and special form description should be explained.

The section on types needs expansion and examples.

Tail recursion should be explained.

MAKE-ECHO-PORT should be described.

The external syntax of numbers should be described. Chapter needs to give more detail.

Need to document HANDLER so that people know what to set a structure handler to. Need to describe keyword clauses in OBJECT syntax.

The introduction to the port chapter needs work. Also, port positions should be documented and implemented.

There should be a section giving a brief description of how the implementation works at the machine level. A full description should be relegated to an independent document, which should be written.

Need to discuss the VM system and reorganize the presentation of the user interface. Many more remarks on error handling and debugging are in order.