evans@mhuxt.UUCP (Sukie Crandall) (01/04/88)
Has anyone used Allegro Common Lisp (from Coral Software)? The review in Byte (current issue) made it look promising. Specifically is there a release > 1.0 and what are its features? What is the status of CLOS for Allegro CL? What kind of upgrade policy do they have (eg. should I buy now and trust them for inexpensive upgrades or should I wait for something a little more finished)? thanks for any info! Steve Crandall ihnp4!mhuxt!evans
bc@mit-amt.MEDIA.MIT.EDU (bill coderre) (01/04/88)
The current version is 1.1, and was free to registered 1.0 owners. ACL runs IN THE BACKGROUND UNDER MULTIFINDER. (As if you had that many spare cycles! Still, an incredibly useful thing. I now have Lisp and Telnet both running on my Prodigy. The Mac that's almost a workstation.) There is a dialog designer tool, which generates good lisp code for all sorts of dialogs. You use it sort of like the Resource Editor dialog designer section. It's still a proto, but pretty darn useful. Although CLOS is not supported by Coral yet, I believe one could hack the portable CLOS to run with little or no trouble. This means I think I saw it done, but I didn't do it. Coral has mumbled that they intend to support whatever is finally decided upon as the "official" common object system. I heard noise that Flavors was being supported, but I'm not sure if it is in this release or next. Many bugs were fixed, and a slight reorganization of functions (traps are now a separate load file, stuff like that, no big deal). You can always call Coral and ask questions.........................bc
hemphill@dalcs.UUCP (Gavin Hemphill) (01/05/88)
In article <2169@mhuxt.UUCP> evans@mhuxt.UUCP (Sukie Crandall) writes: > >Has anyone used Allegro Common Lisp (from Coral Software)? The review in Byte >(current issue) made it look promising. Specifically is there a release > >1.0 and what are its features? What is the status of CLOS for Allegro CL? >What kind of upgrade policy do they have (eg. should I buy now and trust >them for inexpensive upgrades or should I wait for something a little more >finished)? > I've been using the Allegro Common Lisp since it first came out, and the simplest answer is that it is a FULL Common Lisp which works very well on the Mac (I'd recommend at least 2.5 Mbytes of RAM though). I'm currently running CLOS (The Dec 8th version from the coral directory at parcvax) and have had no problems to speak of. The current version is 1.1, which provided a few minor bug fixes and Multifinder awareness. Its great being able to do software development at home, then simply transfer the code to the Symbolics at work and have it run, the only difference being speed. As for specific features, I particularly like the logical pathname scheme and the ease of access to the toolbox routines -- now if we only had the stand alone compiler available (which is supposed to happen sometime this year) I'd be really happy.