On Tue, 2004-02-24 at 09:11, Richard Fateman wrote:
> Since Bill Schelter wrote XMaxima for GCL, why not always use it
> with GCL. Is there some reason to spend time making it also run
> on other lisps? Bill also had a version for Windows that was
> pretty good.
It's a fine question. In fact, explaining all my difficulties on the
list provides an excellent time for me to stop and reflect on how these
difficulties arose in the first place...
1) Xmaxima really is quite platform and lisp independent. The
communication is purely through sockets. The lisp socket code was taken
from a the clocc port system, which includes conditionals for various
lisps.
2) The one big change I made for 5.9.1 was to make the windows
command-line invocation functionally equivalent to the unix version.
Since the most difficult to maintain modifications I did to xmaxima for
5.9.0 were the code to invoke gcl maxima on windows, I thought this
would be a good time to delete an ugly section of unnecessary code.
3) I was thinking that we would keep xmaxima for a long time. From the
recent reactions, it now looks to me like fewer people are in love with
it than I thought.
4) Not too long ago, I wasn't able to get a working gcl binary on
Windows. (Building gcl can be tricky.) The clisp option *seemed* like it
should come virtually for free. However, the build has been cleaned up
considerably in the mean time. I have a working version of gcl on
windows once again. At the same time, getting clisp+xmaxima to work on
windows was much more difficult than I thought.
Even though the discussion makes it look like the xmaxima modifications
are significant, we are really only talking about roughly ten lines of
code. Part of my frustration has been the difficulty in making such a
small change.
I can see where the whole discussion would lead one to think "If it
wasn't broken, why try to fix it?" The point, however, is that the
windows-xmaxima combination is so fragile right now that seemingly
insignificant changes were enough to make it fall apart.
Having said all this, if someone can put together a working
gcl+xmaxima+installer on windows, I will be completely satisfied.
--Jim