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From: Kent M Pitman <pit...@world.std.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: MAKUNBOUND and nested bindings?
Date: 07 May 2003 17:12:36 -0400
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"Franz Kafka" <Symbolics _ XL1201 _ Sebek _ Budo _ Kafka @ hotmail . com> writes:

> "Kent M Pitman" <pit...@world.std.com> wrote in message
> news:sfwk7d28rbw.fsf@shell01.TheWorld.com...
> 
> > At old-Symbolics, a report was commissioned of how expensive it was to
> > merely receive a release of new software from Symbolics.  Not how much
> > we charge people, but how much do they pay out of pocket to accept the
> > release in terms of having to upgrade code.
> >
> > One of the releases was estimated to cost multiple tens of thousands
> > of dollars per customer to accept.  That is, between ten and a hundred
> > thousand dollars.  Why?  That was the release that was going to change
> > the element-type of strings from integer to character.  Just that one
> > change was to cost, across the community, money on the order of a
> > million dollars.  Maybe half a million. Maybe 5 or ten million.
> 
> Since the source code was avail. the user could implement the change at a
> low cost provided that the user was a Lisp programmer.

You miss my point.  The change was ALREADY made.  There was no work to the
implementation required.  But users had tons of their own code that was 
broken by the change -- that is, code that would not compile or would not
load in the new release.  This had to be upgraded.  In some cases, the 
programmer who had written the code was not still on staff and that meant
ramping up a replacement just to keep existing code working.

> And, who else would even want to use a Lispm? The big selling point
> to people who like Lisp is all the Lisp code that comes with
> one. This is another reason I choose to get a used one.

User code did not come with the release.  User code was written by users.