tony@brueer.UUCP (Tony Begg) (04/09/86)
I have tried putting the version of Franz Lisp distributed with 4.2 BSD up on a Sun 3. It seemed to be going OK but came up with "Out of bounds arg to "Arg"" when it tried to run rawlisp. Has anybody succeeded in doing this? If so, could he send me the fixes required or post them to the net? Thanks Tony Begg (tony%ee.brunel.ac.uk@ucl-cs.arpa)
bzs@bu-cs.UUCP (Barry Shein) (04/13/86)
Ok, we need some sort of clearinghouse effort if Franz is going to get fixed for SUN/3s, there are a few annoying bugs that I know of: 1. a.out format changed, dumplisp needs to be fixed I have done this, it works. 2. Liszt compiler turns out forward references which the SUN/3 assembler will not swallow. Fixed by Richard Tobin, U. of Edinburgh, I haven't tested this yet but will shortly, looks like it should work fine. 3. I believe there is still some sort of stack framing error, sometimes a compiled function will not get its args. Open problem, not fixed yet. 4. I believe a little work may need to be done to make cfasl functions to work (compiled, non-lisp functions.) Open problem, not fixed yet. 5. Likely some thought should be put into the various floating point options and how best to handle them, especially in the compiler (ie. none, 68881, Weitek.) Open problem, not fixed yet. I would be happy to act as a clearinghouse for fixes and when they seem accumulated and workably complete (that is, not perfect, but good enough for users to get work done while the rest is fixed) I would be happy to post them. It is also possible that Berkeley would incorporate these patches into their distribution. At least send me mail if you are working on any of these problems. -Barry Shein, Boston University P.S. I know for a fact that the Franz group at UCB will *not* be fixing this for various reasons so it will have to come from us. It is rumored that you can buy these fixes in binary-only form from Franz Inc. if you like. If they generally made sources available at a reasonable price I wouldn't be bothered doing this, but either way they are free to do what they like (and so am I, I think...)