manli@cs.uh.edu (Man L. Li) (12/23/89)
We are looking for Common Lisp interpreter and compiler for our Sun-3 and Sparc-stations. What I understand is that the Sun Common Lisp (Lucid) will cost about $7200 per site. It seems to be a little out of range for us. Can somebody suggest the alternate as the price and where to get it? Occasionally I heard of Allegro Common Lisp and Ibuko (?) Common Lisp. How good are they? Since this is for class work as well as research work, the package has to be reliable. Although KCL is free, we are little bit uncomfortable to use it due to hard to get support. Same goes Xlisp. Your opinions are very much appreciated. Have a nice holiday! ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Man L. Li (manli@cs.uh.edu) Dept. of Computer Science Univ. of Houston, Houston,TX 77204-3475
lou@atanasoff.rutgers.edu (Lou Steinberg) (12/27/89)
In article <19283@uhnix1.uh.edu> manli@cs.uh.edu (Man L. Li) writes: > We are looking for Common Lisp interpreter and compiler for our Sun-3 and > Sparc-stations. [...] > Occasionally I heard of Allegro Common Lisp and Ibuko (?) Common Lisp. > How good are they? Since this is for class work as well as research work, > the package has to be reliable. We (the Rutgers University CS Department) use Allegro Common Lisp for all our class work in lisp and much (most?) of our research work in lisp. All of this is on suns - 3's and 4's. There have been occasional bugs (e.g. closures did not work right in compiled code with one of the earlier releases on the sun-4) but no more than one would expect in this size of a system. Franz Inc., who provide Allegro Common Lisp, have been very good about support. We also have a couple of copies of Lucid, mostly to support KEE. I am not very familiar with Lucid, but my general impression is that Lucid and Allegro are pretty much in the same ballpark as far as features and quality. Which is better for a given situation depends on the details of what you are doing. Price was probably the major factor that caused us to go with Allegro (although the prices have no doubt changed a few times since we made our purchase), and I have not been unhappy. I know nothing about Ibuki. -- Lou Steinberg uucp: {pretty much any major site}!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!lou arpa: lou@cs.rutgers.edu