*BSD News Article 22232


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From: jeff@festival.ed.ac.uk (J W Dalton)
Subject: Re: Franz Lisp anyone?
References: <1993Oct5.172752.10233@midway.uchicago.edu> <BZS.93Oct8215557@ussr.std.com>
Message-ID: <CEqpL8.2Lv@festival.ed.ac.uk>
Organization: Edinburgh University
Date: Mon, 11 Oct 1993 15:55:55 GMT
Lines: 42

bzs@ussr.std.com (Barry Shein) writes:

>From: pynq@quads.uchicago.edu (Jeremy Mathers)
>>Does anyone know where I might find something on this head?  (The
>>implementation with which I am familiar, which was on an old ISI machine,
>>running BSD 4.2, was very complete - included a compiler and all sorts
>>of stuff)

>Liszt, the compiler, compiled into machine code, so that needs to be
>ported. The only machine code ports I'm aware of were the Vax,
>Sun/M68K, and NS32K. Maybe there were others but I'm what you'd need
>is a 386 architecture port. Someone was working on getting it to
>generate C code but I don't remember it ever being finished, it might
>have been difficult due to assumptions about machine code or maybe
>they just lost interest.

I'm probably the person you have in mind.

I have a version of Liszt that emits C, and it works for 386BSD.
I've also gotten the rest of Franz to work.

I've long meant to make this available on the net, but a few
things have been in the way, and I have't found time to remove
them.  Various people expressed interest, but no one said
"yes, do it now" when I said that binaries could be made available
quickly, sources would take longer, and some people really wanted
a Sun4 version, so I didn't do as much on this as I probably
should have.

Now, of course, people are using NetBSD, and more work is needed.
Sigh.

Anyway, if there is any enthusiasm for a Franz or a C-emitting
Liszt, I can try to make one available.

>You might be better off starting with KCL which does generate C code
>and getting a Common Lisp book.

I think KCL is a reasonable choice.  Someone said CMU CL also
emits C.  I didn't think it did, so you might want to make sure.

-- jeff