johnl@ima.ISC.COM (John R. Levine) (04/13/88)
My apologies if this has been thrashed to death, but are there any decent
Lisp implementations that run on a more or less normal 286 PC? Full
Common Lisp unnecessary, compiler desirable to avoid dying of old age while
waiting for programs to run.
Here are ones that I've heard of:
Gold Hill Golden Common Lisp: Full CL with compiler, but quite expensive
and needs 4 meg to run.
Soft Warehouse muLisp-87: Has compiler, claims to run in 640K, costs
about $300.
Star Sapphire Lisp: Claims to be full CL, compiles into C, has some sort
of virtual memory thing. About $450.
TI PC Scheme: Byte code compiler, not full CL, editor, library. Only $80.
My local BBS system has a copy of KCL, and four PD lisps, PC-Lisp,
PCLisp (claimed to be Franz clone), Lisp 2.15, and Xlisp 2.0.
Has anybody hand-to-hand combat with any or all of these to report? The TI
Scheme sure is cheap, is it any good?
TIA,
--
John R. Levine, IECC, PO Box 349, Cambridge MA 02238-0349, +1 617 492 3869
{ ihnp4 | decvax | cbosgd | harvard | yale }!ima!johnl, Levine@YALE.something
Rome fell, Babylon fell, Scarsdale will have its turn. -G. B. Shawleverich@randvax.UUCP (Brian Leverich) (04/14/88)
In article <950@ima.ISC.COM> johnl@ima.UUCP (John R. Levine) writes: >My apologies if this has been thrashed to death, but are there any decent >Lisp implementations that run on a more or less normal 286 PC? I use LISP on a 286 every day, and I've used several different packages and evaluated most of the products on the market. Be aware that there are _major_ differences between PC LISPs in speed (both symbolic and numeric processing), storage capacity (cons space of only 16k dtprs or less is obscenely common), I/O flexibility, and flexibility in interfacing with other languages. Not to mention some PC LISPs require unusual hardware configurations. (There are also differences in the development environment, but most of that strikes me as frills for wimps who like to do programming by exhaustive search rather than getting it right in the first place.) Comments on the LISPs I've used enough to know well. PCLISP is slow, sparse on functions, but does provide fairly large data spaces. It seems to run on anything that looks even vaguely like a PC. It's also cheap and available. UOLISP reflects a set of interesting design choices. It has only 16k dtprs, and given the way it stores bignums and reals in cons space it can only hold a thousand or so of those guys. Numerical processing is painfully slow. On the other hand, on a 640k PC UOLISP can accommodate more than 300k of compiled functions, which is a _lot_ of code. Moreover, compiled UOLISP is blazingly fast at symbolic manipulations. The language also includes its own assembler, so you can write your own DOS function calls and do all sorts of creative things. I mainly use UOLISP in my day-to-day work. TI Scheme is fairly fast and supports fairly large data spaces (that means it has a cons space somewhere around 64k and can accommodate 16k-32k real numbers). Math is much faster than UOLISP, although it is finite precision. Interfaces to other languages are supposed to be fairly smooth, although I haven't tried this myself. For more (and generally better (-:) product reviews, you might look at the following articles: Byte, July 1986, p. 293: BYSO LISP and Waltz LISP. Byte, Oct 1986, p. 249: muLISP-86. Computer Language, Aug 1986, p. 93: ExperLISP, Gold Hill, BYSO, muLISP, UO-LISP, TLC-LISP. Computer Language, Jul 1987, p. 137: ExperLISP, Gold Hill, IQLISP, muLISP Star Sapphire, TransLISP, Waltz. AI Expert, Mar 1988, p. 67: many LISPs..., lousy detail. Good luck--choosing the right LISP isn't easy. -- "Simulate it in ROSS" Brian Leverich | U.S. Snail: 1700 Main St. ARPAnet: leverich@rand-unix | Santa Monica, CA 90406 UUCP/usenet: decvax!randvax!leverich | Ma Bell: (213) 393-0411 X7769
leverich@randvax.U: P (Brian Leverich) (04/14/88)
In article <950@ima.ISC.COM> johnl@ima.U:CP (John R. Levine) writes: >My apologies if this has been thrashed to death, but are there any decent >Lisp implementations that run on a more or less normal 286 PC? I use LISP on a 286 every day, and I've used several different packages and evaluated most of the products on the market. Be aware that there are _major_ differences between PC LISPs in speed (both symbolic and numeric processing), storage capacity (cons space of only 16k dtprs or less is obscenely common), I/O flexibility, and flexibility in interfacing with other languages. Not to mention some PC LISPs require unusual hardware configurations. (There are also differences in the development environment, but most of that strikes me as frills for wimps who like to do programming by exhaustive search rather than getting it right in the first place*) Comments on the LISPs I've used enough to know well. PCLISP is slow, sparse on functions, but does provide fairly large data spaces. It seems to run on anything that looks even vaguely like a PC. It's also cheap and available. UOLISP reflects a set of interesting design choices. It has only 16k dtprs, and given the way it stores bignums and reals in cons space it can only hold a thousand or so of those guys. Numerical processing is painfully slow. On the other hand, on a 640k PC UOLISP can accommodate more than 300k of compiled functions, which is a _lot_ of code. Moreover, compiled UOLISP is blazingly fast at symbolic manipulations. The language also includes its own assembler, so you can write your own DOS function calls and do all sorts of creative things. I mainly use UOLISP in my day-to-day work. TI Scheme is fairly fast and supports fairly large data spaces (that means it has a cons space somewhere around 64k and can accommodate 16k-32k real numbers). Math is much faster than UOLISP, although it is finite precision. Interfaces to other languages are supposed to be fairly smooth, although I haven't tried this myself. For more (and generally better (-:) product reviews, you might look at the following articles: Byte, July 1986, p. 293: BYSO LISP and Waltz LISP. Byte, Oct 1986, p. 249: muLISP-86. Computer Language, Aug 1986, p. 93: ExperLISP, Gold Hill, BYSO, muLISP, UO-LISP, TLC-LISP. Computer Language, Jul 1987, p. 137: ExperLISP, Gold Hill, IQLISP, muLISP Star Sapphire, TransLISP, Waltz. AI Expert, Mar 1988, p. 67: many LISPs..., lousy ds:ail. Good luck--choosing the right LISP isn't easy. -- "Simulate it in ROSS" Brian Leverich | U.S. Snail: 1700 Main St. ARPAnet: leverich@rand-unix | Santa Monica, CA 90406 UUCP/usenet: decvax!randvax!leverich | Ma Bell: (213) 393-0411 X7769
bobmon@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (RAMontante) (04/15/88)
In article <950@ima.ISC.COM> johnl@ima.UUCP (John R. Levine) writes: [...] >Here are ones that I've heard of: [...] >TI PC Scheme: Byte code compiler, not full CL, editor, library. Only $80. [...] >Has anybody hand-to-hand combat with any or all of these to report? The TI >Scheme sure is cheap, is it any good? I like TIScheme quite a bit. As long as you have the memory, it's pretty thorough. Scheme has some variations from lisp, such as treating functions just the same as any other data object in terms of referencing/dereferencing, passing them around; it also emaphasizes block structuring and scoping much more than I find in lisp. You can manipulate the environments as data objects, if you really want to, for example. Example: I wrote a simulation of a (very _tiny_) computer in Scheme, starting at the flipflop level, that could run a program. Only 4 address bits, so it had only 16 words of 4-bit memory, but making it bigger would have just been a bit more tedious (it was bit-sliced). disclaimer: a number of people (not including me) worked with or at TI on the package's development. On the other hand, I'm not much of a lisp hacker. RAMontante, bobmon @ any of iuvax.cs.indiana.edu, Computer Science (one of 'em ) silver.bacs.indiana.edu, Indiana University (should be up) iucs.cs.indiana.edu