Does dbl need gcl, does other lisp work, and a possible bug

On Thu, 2002-08-29 at 16:13, Zheng Yin wrote:
> Hi,
> 
>         Is dbl supposed to work with clisp or anything other than gcl?
> I saw a message from the mailing list archive by the late
> William Schelter that suggests it should, but when I tried to
> load dbl.el into emacs it just complains that it could not load
> gcl.

Unfortunately, I don't know anything about dbl. I hope someone else can
answer your question.

> 	On a related note, can I compile maxima with any lisp other 
> the 3 given in the README.lisp, such as open mcl, or SBCL, with the push
> of a button?  What is exactly special about gcl, cmucl, and clisp
> that they work with maxima, or should I phrase the question the other
> way around?

There are two issues: the lisp code and the infrastructure.

The infrastructure, i.e., the configure script, the Makefile.am's and
the wrapper scripts have several instances of special cases each lisp
implementation. This is unavoidable for various reasons. Supporting a
new lisp implementation would require modifying the infrastructure. I am
quite willing to do do. First however, Maxima needs to be made
compilable with the lisp in question.

The lisp code is asymptotically approaching ANSI CL, albeit slowly.
Getting Maxima itself to work with any lisp implementation should not be
too difficult as long it is reasonably ANSI-compliant. Maxima also
relies on some non-ANSI lisp features, which have to be special-cased.
This, too, is unavoidable.

If you are interested in getting, say, Open MCL, to work with Maxima,
please let me know.

> 	 notice that ctrl-Z, instead of suspending maxima and return to 
> the shell, put it in semi-coma, which is revived by a CONT signal send by 
> kill to the lisp interpreter.  I thought this might be a maxima problem 
> because ctrl-Z does suspend the lisp interpreter when I am running it alone.
> I am running clisp 2.7 under darwin.

Interesting. ctrl-Z suspends using clisp, cmucl and gcl under Linux. The
behavior you see isn't Maxima's fault.

--Jim