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Date:Mon Nov 19 22:47:26 2000 
Subject:Re: Init files?!? 
From:Aaron Sloman See text for reply address 
Volume-ID:1001119.03 

[To reply replace "Aaron.Sloman.XX" with "A.Sloman"]

Marco Antoniotti <marcoxa@cs.nyu.edu> writes:

> Date: 19 Nov 2000 17:10:25 -0500
> Organization: New York University
>
> I just installed Poplog on my Linux machine (running RH6.2).
>
> I am mostly interested in the CL subsystem, although I am quite amazed
> at the versatility of the whole environment.  Congratulations to the
> designers and the implementors.

The main architect of Poplog, John Gibson, has now retired but I'll
copy your message to him.

> I have a question regarding "init files" (I know I should have RTFMed
> a little more, but I am notoriously lazy).

It's often much quicker to get help from an experienced user,
especially when the documentation, though very rich, is hard for a
beginner to navigate. See HELP helpfiles
    $usepop/pop/help/helpfiles
    $usepop/pop/lisp/help/helpfiles
    $usepop/pop/lisp/ref/poplog_only
        (Summarises poplog-specific features of Poplog common lisp)

    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/doc/lisphelp/bugs
        This summarises missing/incomplete features of Poplog
        Common Lisp, relative to ANSI lisp.

Anyhow, here's an answer to your question if I have understood it.

Either in your login file, or just before you use start up poplog
define the unix environment variable $poplib to have as its value
the name of a directory in which you want to put initialisation
files for pop-11, Ved, poplog prolog, poplog common lisp, or poplog
ML. If you don't do this it defaults to your login directory,
which is not what most people want.

E.g. suppose you create a directory ~/poplib, then in your login
script do

    setenv poplib ~/poplib

or the equivalent for your login shell.

In that directory you can then create the following files:

    $poplib/init.p

        A pop-11 file read whenever poplog starts up.

    $poplib/vedinit.p

        A pop-11 file read whenever ved or xved starts up.

    $poplib/init.lsp

        A lisp file read whenever poplog common lisp starts up

    $poplib/init.pl
        A prolog file read whenever poplog prolog starts up

    $poplib/init.pml
        An ML file read whenever poplog ML starts up

If you start up poplog with the %noinit flag, it ignores the above
initialisation files.

For more details read
    HELP initial

(i.e.

    $usepop/pop/help/initial

best read in Ved alas because someone converted it to use Ved's
"fancy" graphic characters.)


You may also find HELP poplisp useful in case you need to invoke any
pop-11 (or Ved) utilities from Lisp.

I am not a lisp user, so I may have forgotten some crucial detail!

A (partly out of date/incomplete) overview of the poplog directory
tree can be found in
    $usepop/pop/doc/sysspec

Any numbers in there will definitely be out of date (memory, disk,
CPU times , etc.)

Hope that helps.

If you develop any libraries, etc. that work with Poplog common
lisp, and you would like to make them available at the FreePoplog
site, or would like pointers to them to be included in the existing
information files, let me know.

Aaron
===
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   (ReadATas@please !)
PAPERS: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/cogaff/
FREE TOOLS: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/freepoplog.html