tj@CIS.OHIO-STATE.EDU (Todd R Johnson) (02/12/90)
A few weeks ago I posted a message asking for any information on how to run Common Lisp on the Amiga. This is a summary of the replies. Many people indicated that Xlisp was CL (common lisp) compatible. It is true that Xlisp supports a lot of CL features, but many important ones are missing. Xlisp also doesn't have a compiler. It may be possible to add the CL features that I need to Xlisp and run uncompiled, but I can't verify that without first adding the features --- something that could take considerable effort. In any case, I am looking into it. I got version 2.1 of Xlisp from the Winterp distribution and have it compiled under Lattice 5.04a. I'll be releasing the stock version shortly. I got one reply about an add in Amiga Resource for McCauley Software Systems Lisp. This claimed to be a lisp interpreter with many common lisp features. The price is $99.95. I called the company and an answering machine told me to leave my name and address if I wanted product information. I did this and a few days later I got a single sheet of information on the product. Here is a summary of that information: It is a LISP interpreter. No mention is made of a compiler. It supports more than 335 Common Lisp functions/macros/special forms. Features Data types: symbols, lists, ints, floats, chars, strings, 7-dim arrays, vectors, sequences, user-defined structures, packages, and hash tables. Control structures: block, catch, flet, function, go, if, labels, let, let*, macrolet, progv, quote, return-from, setq, tagbody, throw, and unwind protect. There is a detailed list on the specific number of each kind of common lisp function supported. Built in graphics primitives. User defined functions and macros with &optional, &rest, &key, and &aux lambda keywords. Interpreter environment can be saved to and restored from a text file. Requires 512K and AmigaDos 1.2 To order, send $99.95 plus $4 shipping to: McCauley Software Systems P.O. Box 271031 Houston, Texas 77277-1031 (713) 630-0647 Unfortunately this simply isn't enough information to let me decide if I want to spend $100 on the product. No mention is made of the speed of the system, or what language the system is coded in. I need to know if it will work on a 68020 machine, how fast it runs, what specific common lisp features are included in detail, and what kind of updates, if any, are planned. This might be exactly what I need, but it could also be a waste of money. If anyone knows anything about this company or its product, or knows of a discount firm that sells the product, please let me know. If I end up taking the risk and buying it, I'll be sure to post the details here. I also found mention of lisp in some of the mail order ads. Creative Computers is advertising something called Amiga Lisp for $65. Another place (don't remember who) is advertising Metacomco Lisp for $135. I suspect that one of these, if not both, is the original lisp that came out when the Amiga was introduced. That version of lisp is not very good --- xlisp is much better. The Creative lisp might be the McCauley version. I'm going to call them and try to find out. If I can get McCauley lisp for $65, I'll take the risk. I didn't get any replies about whether one of the Mac lisps would run under Amax or about an Amiga port of AKCL. Sadly, that appears to be it for Common Lisp on the Amiga. At present there is no complete implementation of Common Lisp for the Amiga. ---Todd Todd R. Johnson tj@cis.ohio-state.edu Laboratory for AI Research The Ohio State University