>>>>> "James" == James Amundson <amundson@fnal.gov> writes:
James> On Thu, 2003-02-20 at 15:54, Stavros Macrakis wrote:
>> > To my mind, there are six lisp implementations that are logical
>> > possibilities for maxima: GCL, Clisp, CMUCL, ACL, SBCL and OpenMCL.
>>
>> Supporting multiple Lisp implementations is nice, but it is also work.
>> I admit I am not up on all these systems; could someone summarize what
>> the rationale is for each of them? HW/OS platform support?
>> Performance? Development environment? Other facilities (graphics?, RPC
>> support, ...)?
James> SBCL is a fork of CMUCL. I won't try to describe the differences.
Intended to be easy to build. Has a fewer ANSI compliance issues.
Currently somewhat less stable.
James> OpenMCL is a fast ANSI lisp implementation available on MacOS X.
James> ---------------------------------------------
James> No one lisp is completely superior to all the others.
James> I have found the ability to compare maxima on multiple lisp
James> implementations invaluable, particularly when trying to decide the
James> difference between a Maxima bug, a Lisp bug and a standard
James> misinterpretation. Adding more lisps to the list isn't really that hard.
Let me say that porting ACL to the current sources was not that hard
since maxima is pretty ANSI compliant already.
Adding another lisp should be simple. The only thing that really
needs porting are the things we use that aren't specified by ANSI,
like getenv, running external programs for plotting, etc.
I think it's good that multiple Lisps are supported. They flag
different bugs in the code, and the more ANSI CL we make maxima, the
better we'll be.
Ray