Stavros Macrakis wrote:
> What Lisps does Maxima work on?
>
> The source code includes conditionals (#- #+) for a long list of
> implementations besides the usual GCL and CLisp, but how many of these
> do we believe work? Do we have any sense of how hard it is to port
> Maxima to other Lisps (possibly non-Common Lisp)?
I think that many of the Lisps simply do not exist and
their conditionalizations could be removed in the interests
of un-obfuscating the code. Multics and PDP10 hardware probably
do not run anywhere. The NIL/Vax code probably never ran anywhere
because there was no garbage collector. There are a handful of
LispMs. Franz Lisp ran on VAX, M68000 (many brands, including Macintosh),
but those machines now also run common lisps, I think.
Is there a less-than-common-lisp that can still run maxima?
My guess is that the minimum would be pretty close to Franz, since
my intention was to bring up a lisp that could run macsyma on
the vaxes at Berkeley. And we knew that MIT people were working on a
superlisp
called NIL for the VAX. We did not want to waste time duplicating
such an effort. So the conditionalizations for Franz might be
"minimal maclisp needed for maxima".
Is there a Franz for the PocketPC? or Xlisp? or are we talking
autocad lisp or emacs lisp?
It seems to me that some of the features you need to do computer
algebra reasonably well include a large display, keyboard, and
off-line storage. I have no idea of how the memory in the pocketpc
is laid out, but if it is segmented, or much of it is occupied
by an OS, then the problems may be significant.
If a PDA is connected wirelessly to a network, it makes running
stuff on it less interesting.
RJF
>