Genera and Packages
As I alluded to in an earlier post, Symbolics Genera takes a slightly different approach to packages than most current environments (such as SLIME under Emacs). Part of that is because, unlike GNU Emacs today, the editor and all its intelligence is running inside the Lisp environment; another part is due to Genera supporting multiple dialects of Lisp, each slightly compatible with the other. One consequence is that Zmacs pays close attention to the "file attributes line" in your Lisp source files. (That's the line at the beginning of the file which contains the marker "-*-"). Other Lisp environments use a heuristic, like looking for the first IN-PACKAGE form. A chicken-and-egg problem arises when loading a file that expects to be read in a particular package. What if the package doesn't exist? Well, it isn't possible to use that package to read the file. But the package itself is defined in a file. For me this caused a bit of confusion, because i...