dlw@Atherton.COM (David Williams) (01/17/91)
How about using Xlisp as an alternative to Allegro Lisp? While it may not have all the bells and whistles of a commercial "Common Lisp" kind of Lisp...should there not be enough to get the job done? And If not how about making it part of your coursework to have those CS students extend it to be more compatible? One other advantage is that Xlisp runs on Unix, Macintoshes, and PCs already. So, if students don't have NeXT cubes personally, but do have one of the other platforms they can do their work on there. It is public domain and SOURCE is freely available. My own personal plan was to take the sources and compile it up on my cube once I get some spare time. I also want to revamp Niels Mayer of HP Labs Winterp (which is also Public Domain and available on MIT's expo) and marries Xlisp and Motif together to do the same thing with NextStep. In addition Niels has changed Xlisp into a server that listens on a TCP socket for input. So you can communicate with the Winterp [Widget Interpreter] via several methods 1) Gnuemacs, or 2) a client program called wl. Now as wl is a very short, simple program you could also just wrap its functionality inside a IB based application as well. Actually, the cleaner thing would be to abstract user interface "widgets" such that depending on the platform you are running on you use the appropriate user interface components. In that way, you design a User interface and it would run on a NeXT using NeXTStep objects and would run on a Unix box displaying Motif widgets and on a Macintosh using Mac ToolBox widgets. In any case, I am new to Lisp and Xlisp.... Just thought I would advance something that may prove helpful to those of you who need a Lisp of SOME sort on NeXT under 2.0. So Lisp hackers, what say you? David Williams dlw@atherton.com