I just tried making maxima for the first time since (I think)
5.2, using allegro common lisp 6.2 under windows,
and I was struck by what seems to me to be the large reversal
in portability in going toward 5.9.0. Maybe I am doing something
wrong, but here is what I had to do in 5.2. then what I had
to do for 5.9.0
5.2:
1. Check an allegro-specific file that says how to dump lisps
and some other non-standard items in Allegro. I think it also
rendered some non-ANSI particulars of Maxima into
ANSI lisp. This was closely modeled on a GCL file.
I think this was called excl-dump.lisp. I think that paths etc
were put in this file.
2. start up an allegro ANSI lisp (upper case).
3. load excl-dump.lisp.
4. type (compile)
5. exit, start again, but type (load)
6. type (dump "maxima.dxl")
7. to run maxima, specify an image including maxima.dxl
5.9.0
First, spend an afternoon loading cygwin on my machine.
spend an afternoon looking at many files which may or
may not be correctly set up, with mysterious names and flags
in a scripting language which I intensely dislike. Then
run configure, make, (which fails)... at least one problem
is that the location for windows programs tends to be
in a directory with a space in the name, e.g.
c:\Program Files\acl62\alisp.exe for ANSI Allegro CL.
so lisp-utils/run fails.
Try to do, by hand, the effect of the run script.
Beyond that, names like /usr/local/ seem to be all
over the place. I had to disable $file_search which got
into an infinite error loop with windows-filenames.
So my impression is that the portability is mostly
n lisps, but one style of operating system (and it is not the
operating system running on 95% of machines).
Am I misunderstanding something here???
By the way, I tried this so I could run newsimp on Allegro
CL to see if it had the bugs that GCL seemed to have. I
am far more comfortable with debugging tools and environment
on Allegro, and figure that one of the early tests to see
if there is a bug in GCL is to run the example on another
lisp. I am even less familiar with CLISP.
anyway..
Allegro, as well as commercial Macsyma do not have these errors.
However, further experimentation pointed to the need for
more debugging in places, .e.g taylor(erf(x),x,0,2) works,
but not taylor(erf(x),x,0,30)... which leads to stack oveflow.
(I suspect interaction with simplifier ordering and other
programs. This fails on Allegro but not commercial Macsyma!).
RJF