jjacobs@well.UUCP (11/22/86)
>khj@ecsvax.UUCP asked about LISP and SNOBOL for VAX/VMS >for "education". Ken, Low cost possibilities include XLISP, which is Public Domain, written in C and *very* easy to port to VMS. It is available from David Betz 114 Davenport Ave. Manchester, NH 03103 (603)625-4691 Sources are also widely available on various BBS'es, as well as on BIX and CompuServe. If you have any type of PC hooked up to your VAX, send David $10 and he will send you a diskette with the sources etc. He directly supports Mac, PC's, Atari and Amiga. With the exception of one file that provides the user interface, the source is totally vanilla C and is the same for all machines. One additional advantage to XLISP is that your students can also run it on various PC's. I wrote a structure editor, ASSE, that is very useful. See the AI Expert Article in October's issue. Le_LISP is another possibility. It is "old style" LISP, very clean and very compact. Very light load on a VAX. Contact Dr. Lee Rice at Marquette University. There is a very reasonable price for academic institutions and it won't make your system manager want to kill you. Common LISPs include Kyoto Common LISP " Ibuki 399 Main Street Los Altos, CA 94022 (415) 949-1126 Henson Graves is the person you want to speak with. The prices are $700 for objects and $700 for complete sources. Object code is available for Vaxen, Suns, Apollos, and a few others. KCL is used by enough folks that some public domain tools support it; specifically, Xerox's Portable CommonLoops will run under KCL." (The above is from another msg). Lucid and DEC both have Common LISPs available. I believe they both provide discounts for academic institutions. FRANZ LISP and FRANZ Extended Common LISP are available. (I also believe that there are Public Domain versions of FRANZ LISP available, which are old and not supported by the company). You can get SPICE from Ron Ohlander at USC Information Sciences Institute, Marina del Rey, CA. They are now distributing SPICE instead of CMU. Price of a tape. For SNOBOL, check the DECUS tape catalog. This is the DEC User's Group. The tapes contain Public Domain software and are available for the price of the tapes. Or try the Comp. Sci. Dept. at Univ. of Minnesota. My *personal* recommendation is Le_LISP... Jeffrey M. Jacobs CONSART Systems Inc. Technical and Managerial Consultants P.O. Box 3016, Manhattan Beach, CA 90266 (213)376-3802 CIS:75076,2603 BIX:jeffjacobs USENET: well!jjacobs