Keith Derrick wrote:
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> From: kderrick at hotmail.com
> To: dan.stanger at ieee.org
> Subject: RE: [Maxima] (no subject)
> Date: Wed, 14 Dec 2011 19:28:11 -0800
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> Thanks, but (a) why did maxima complain that lisp wasn't installed when it's
been running fine; (b) why is there no install image built for a widely used
distro like Ubuntu; (c) why does maxima require gcl to be built with flags
which are not used in the standard distribution of gcl?
For gcl and clisp it seems that the number of maintainers of these lisps is
very small so that building them is more and more problematic. For example
yesterday i tried to build clisp on my mac and found an error (a missing
.h file). I have looked at the macports port, indeed that error has a patch.
Needless to say, clisp is no more available via fink. How is it that a new
version of clisp is released without even such trivial errors seen, i don't
understand - or rather i understand that people only try their stuff on
Windows. Now the number of Mac users being 5 or 10 times the number of Linux
users, don't expect too much. In my experience there are good precompiled
packages of cmucl and sbcl on their respective sites. With these packages,
you can compile maxima in a couple of minutes without any problem
whatsoever.If you are a purist, you can also download the source code of sbcl
or cmucl and recompile them form source - but for that you already need a
precompiled cmucl or sbcl because they are programmed in pure lisp and not in
C. Moreover for cmucl you will have to follow a quite long documentation for
doing the build. This is obviously perfectly useless except for developers of
cmucl or sbcl. On the other hand, having the source at hand may be useful if
you want to discover, for example, exactly what system calls are available.
--
Michel Talon