chari@sonia.ma.utexas.edu (Christopher M. Whatley) (06/21/91)
People should not confuse KCl with AKCL. AKCL is a serious environment which is aggressively supported and widely used by AI professionals and researchers for a number of reasons. A few are: 1) SOURCE CODE. I say that anyone who depends upon Franz or Lucid to write perfect CLtL compliant code needs to have their head checked. At least with AKCL, if there is a bug, you can fix it yourself if you need to. Also, you can see exactly how the low level code is done and can get a more concrete idea of how to improve your code's performance. 2) FREE. It don't cost a penny. How much are Lucid and Franz? $4000 per machine maybe. 3) FAST. Compiled code in AKCL (Sun3 and Sun4) beats the pants off of Lucid and Franz with the gabriel benchmark. > From: tenny@ootool.dec.com (Dave Tenny) > Naturally, my opinion is worth what you paid for it as well, but I hope > it helps answer your question. If you just want to write > relatively inconsequential toy code in Lisp, > then KCL will probably meet your needs admirably. I guess IBM's scratchpad symbolic math environment is just inconsequential trash. It weighs in at about 50MB of source and was developed with AKCL. Several other important tools have been written with AKCL as well. Also, CLOS and CLX work fine with AKCL, I will be really happy when we get AKCL _working_ on the NeXT not just the crippled version that exists now. -- ------------------------------------------------------------------- Chris Whatley - The UNIX Guy | UT-Austin Mathematics | "Stab it and steer!" E-mail: chari@{math,emx,cs}.utexas.edu | -Sailor Ph: 512/471-7107(O),499-0475(H) | -------------------------------------------------------------------