meyer@waltz.UUCP (01/22/85)
I have a copy of GCLISP and have taken a limited test drive with it
to see how she rolls. It costs $495 and comes with a standard
2 and half inch thick documentation binder plus a copy of Guy Steele's
book on Common Lisp and Winston's book on Lisp. Documentation seems
pretty reasonable.
Your PC needs 512K memory before you can do anything. Ofcourse, this
package would gladly use up any additional memory available. The{_}i
environment tries it's best to act like a Lisp Machine in that the
GMACS editor and the Lisp Interpreter run together side by side so
that flipping back and forth through the debugging process is
convienient. Lisp itself seems to run very fast from the functions
that I tested (not exhaustive). Garbage collection also ran fast,
but then again, I didn't have that much memory to collect.
Something to note is that this is not true Common Lisp. In many ways
it comes close, but it is NOT lexically scoped and many of the
Common Lisp functions as defined by Steele are not there. However,
if you are not concerned about transportability of your source to
run on other Common Lisp environments, then I think that this really
is a pretty good PC Lisp implementation. It has a primitive "window"
system which allows you to define a textual area of the screen to do
I/O. It basically supports things like TYI and TYO, create blank line,
clear to end of screen, etc. Not particularly fancy, but gets the job
done.
It comes with a GMACS editor which is their version of EMACS. It has
many of the same keystrokes and is a very useful editor although all
the power EMACS is not there.
If you or your user is just getting into Lisp, there is a product
included in the package called the Lisp Explorer, written by Winston.
It basically is organized like trays of "slides", containing a
progessive series of lessons on Lisp. It is nice in that it pops
you right into a Lisp interpreter during the lessons so that you
can get your hands dirty while you go through the lesson. I thought
this package was quite slick.
There is a debugger that allows the standard stepping and tracing
functions, but there also is a nice graphic debugging aid included
that shows you recursion tracing --- basically shows the tree
building and the values being returned as the function executes. This
coupled together with the stepper is quite nice.
So what's negative? It is brand new, and thus there are bugs to be
worked out. I just received an upgrade -- but haven't shaken it
out much yet. Themeyer@waltz.UUCP (01/22/85)
I have a copy of GCLISP and have taken a limited test drive with it
to see how she rolls. It costs $495 and comes with a standard
2 and half inch thick documentation binder plus a copy of Guy Steele's
book on Common Lisp and Winston's book on Lisp. Documentation seems
pretty reasonable.
Your PC needs 512K memory before you can do anything. Ofcourse, this
package would gladly use up any additional memory available. The{_}i
environment tries it's best to act like a Lisp Machine in that the
GMACS editor and the Lisp Interpreter run together side by side so
that flipping back and forth through the debugging process is
convienient. Lisp itself seems to run very fast from the functions
that I tested (not exhaustive). Garbage collection also ran fast,
but then again, I didn't have that much memory to collect.
Something to note is that this is not true Common Lisp. In many ways
it comes close, but it is NOT lexically scoped and many of the
Common Lisp functions as defined by Steele are not there. However,
if you are not concerned about transportability of your source to
run on other Common Lisp environments, then I think that this really
is a pretty good PC Lisp implementation. It has a primitive "window"
system which allows you to define a textual area of the screen to do
I/O. It basically supports things like TYI and TYO, create blank line,
clear to end of screen, etc. Not particularly fancy, but gets the job
done.
It comes with a GMACS editor which is their version of EMACS. It has
many of the same keystrokes and is a very useful editor although all
the power EMACS is not there.
If you or your user is just getting into Lisp, there is a product
included in the package called the Lisp Explorer, written by Winston.
It basically is organized like trays of "slides", containing a
progessive series of lessons on Lisp. It is nice in that it pops
you right into a Lisp interpreter during the lessons so that you
can get your hands dirty while you go through the lesson. I thought
this package was quite slick.
There is a debugger that allows the standard stepping and tracing
functions, but there also is a nice graphic debugging aid included
that shows you recursion tracing --- basically shows the tree
building and the values being returned as the function executes. This
coupled together with the stepper is quite nice.
So what's negative? It is brand new, and thus there are bugs to be
worked out. I just received an upgrade -- but haven't shaken it
out much yet. The package is big and needs lots of memory, but
overall, I think it is a pretty good buy.
==============================================================================
Dane Meyer
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