darin@nova.laic.uucp (Darin Johnson) (03/29/89)
Is anyone else working on getting xlisp (or any lisp) amiga-ized, other than AMXLisp? I have AMXLisp, but am very dissapointed. It took be 5 tries to get the demo to run without getting a guru. Access to every little Amiga function seems to be overkill. Lisp hackers may love writing low level stuff in Lisp, but I'd rather do the dirty work in C and do the interesting stuff in Lisp. Also, the console IO is dismal! You can actually see each character as it is printed, sad to say, I saw better performance on an AT quite a few version back (which I only used for about 10 minutes to download some xlisp program). I suspect that replacing the console IO routines would greatly speed things up (get rid of agetc, aputc), but I don't have time. I have some ideas about how to make xlisp useful (also little Smalltalk for that matter) but don't have the time. The simplest idea is just to implement message ports (goes nicely with message passing) to communicate with external processes. This way you could write a nice program to handle menu selections, etc. and pass this to the xlisp program. The hard part would be to have the external program figure out lisp parameters. The other idea would be to do something similar to what a lot of common Lisp implementations do; use compiled object code. The idea would be to loadseg in an executable program, and run it. The main program would set up a call table and then exit, returning the address of the table. Then instead of unloadseg'ging the program, you would keep it around and call the routines in the returned table. (A little farfetched, but probably doable) Does anyone have any other ideas on how to do stuff like this? (alternatively you could implement a window, narrator, etc. class, but this is not general purpose) Darin Johnson (leadsv!laic!darin@pyramid.pyramid.com) Can you "Spot the Looney"?