"Vadim V. Zhytnikov" wrote:
>
> It seems to me that the best strategy is to maintain Maxima compatible
> with as many background lisps as possible both free and commercial
> (if someone cares to do this). Tighting Maxima to any particular Lisp
> incarnation which would be a terrible mistake. Whenever possible
> any piece of Maxima code which is particular Lisp dependent
> must be replaced by standard compliant code. This is not easy way but
> it seems that this is the only way to make Maxima future safe.
> Lisps come and go...
Most of the machine/implementation code in Maxima is, I think,
in a very few files that define, depending upon the target
machine, different macro expansions.
>
> This is theory. But what do we have in practice right now?
> We have three Common Lisp implementations -
> GCL, clisp and cmucl.
My impression is that cmucl has an elaborate compiler that
takes a great deal of time but sometimes produces better code.
The allegro CL (commercial) that I use seems to be very
clever about garbage collection, and has various other
positive attributes, but has the negative aspect that
it is not free.
There are other lisps too; there is a site for the
association of lisp users. There are free schemes,
and one computer algebra system (Jacal) written in
scheme.