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Date:Mon Aug 7 14:08:00 1999 
Subject:Re: Is Lisp Dead on Linux? (NO!) 
From:Aaron Sloman See text for reply address 
Volume-ID:990807.01 

"David McClain" <dmcclain@azstarnet.com> writes:

> Date: Sat, 7 Aug 1999 02:17:19 -0700
>
> Well doggone anyway... I wanted to get a Lisp up and running on my new RH 6
> Linux box and both CMUCL and CLISP bomb out before I can even say hello...
> After pouring through the archives on CMUCL it appears that I have to wait
> for a new build (if one ever appears) because of fundamental changes to the
> Libc. CLISP, OTOH bombs with a bad file descriptor. It appears that the
> CMUCL crowd went on to CMU Dylan, which is also dead from the sounds of it,
> and Harlequin is also disappearing... So, doesn't anyone use Lisp on Linux?

I suspect thos systems will all be made to work eventually, but if you are
in a hurry you can try the freepoplog system recently announced,
accessible from here

    ftp://ftp.cs.bham.ac.uk/pub/dist/poplog/freepoplog.html

I am assured it runs on Intel+RedHat 6.0 though I have not tried
that combination personally.

If you fetch the linux version and you are not interested in
the other languages you can remove the sub-directories
with code and documentation for Prolog and ML, and their saved
images, to save space.

Poplog includes an incremental compiler for Common Lisp, as well as
other AI languages, as explained in previous postings to comp.lang.lisp
with the word "versions" in the Subject line.

But Poplog Common Lisp is not heavily optimised, and some things are
slower than others. The compiler and garbage collector are very
fast, but if you do lots of number crunching/array crunching it
doesn't do the kind of optimising some other lisp systems do.

E.g. at present there's no way to avoid run-time typechecking on all
floating point operations. But it is still usable for develelopment,
teaching, etc.

Since the source code is now available at the freepoplog site (by
courtesy of Sussex University) I wonder whether some Lisp experts
would be willing to investigate ways of improving the Lisp?

Questions and comments about Poplog common lisp should be posted, or
cross-posted to comp.lang.pop

Aaron
===
Aaron Sloman, ( http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/ )
School of Computer Science, The University of Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK
EMAIL   A.Sloman@cs.bham.ac.uk
Phone: +44-121-414-4775 (Sec 4774)       Fax:   +44-121-414-4281
-- 
Aaron Sloman, ( http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/ )
School of Computer Science, The University of Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK
EMAIL A.Sloman AT cs.bham.ac.uk   (NB: Anti Spam address)
PAPERS: ftp://ftp.cs.bham.ac.uk/pub/groups/cog_affect/0-INDEX.html