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From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Subject: Franz Lisp lives! (on BSD PCs)
Message-ID: <CMrrKx.4nq@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
Sender: usenet@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (C News Software)
Nntp-Posting-Host: bute.aiai.ed.ac.uk
Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Date: Wed, 16 Mar 1994 18:05:20 GMT
Lines: 82
An implementation of Franz Lisp, Opus 38.92 (more or less) is now
available for 386 and 486 machines running NetBSD 0.9. The same
system should work, with perhaps a few modifications, in 386BSD
and FreeBSD. It may also work in NetBSD.current.
If anyone does make it work for other operating systems or machines,
or if anyone is interested in helping with a SPARC port, please let me
know. (Though I say SPARC, it's mostly the OS that will cause problems.)
I first mentioned this Lisp on the net over a year ago, and then again
near the end of last year, but until now I've been a total failure at
actually making it available. Consequently, I'd like to apologize to
everyone who's sent me e-mail about it for not having done something
sooner. Anyway, now that I've finally got everything set up, I should
be quicker at releasing new versions or related software items when they
come along.
So, what is it?
It's essentially the Berkeley (not Franz Inc) version of Franz
Lisp that was distributed with 4.2 BSD. It is therefore appropriate
that it reappear now that BSD systems are becoming more generally
available.
Franz Lisp (in case you don't know) is a pre-Common Lisp Lisp,
very similar to MacLisp. It's smaller and simpler than Common
Lisp but doesn't have full lexical scoping. The most accessible
reference is the original edition of Wilensky's _LISPcraft_,
but this distribution includes the full reference manual which
is also accessible from lisp via the "help" function (which
doesn't "evaluate it's arguments", as we used to say).
Anyway, this version of Franz has a couple of interesting features:
* The compiler emits C rather than native assembler and is
consequently fairly portable. The same compiler has been
used on 68k Suns, VAX 750s, and ICL Perqs running PNX.
* More of the interpreter is written in C than before.
There's still some 386 assembly code, but not very much.
How does one get it?
Ftp to: address: macbeth.cogsci.ed.ac.uk
user: anonymous
password: your net address
directory: pub/franz-for-NetBSD
You should see the following files:
-rw-r--r-- 1 richard daemon 810784 Mar 16 12:11 franz.16Mar94.tar.gz
-rwxr-xr-x 1 richard daemon 289794 Oct 23 17:03 lisp.gz
-rwxr-xr-x 1 richard daemon 426285 Oct 23 17:04 liszt.gz
What about installation?
lisp.gz and liszt.gz are compressed, executable images for the
interpreter and compiler respectively. They assume that the
lisp-library-directory is /usr/local/lib/lisp.
franz.16Mar94.tar.gz contains the library and the other sources needed
to rebuild the system (if that's what you want to do).
You will at least want to compile the library. Put the (decompressed)
lisp and liszt somewhere in your $PATH, unpack the sources, make
/usr/local/lib/lisp be a symbolic link to the lisplib subdirectory
of the sources, cd to lisplib, and type "make all".
You may also be able to rebuild the system. If you want to do
this, I'd recommend trying the distributed executable images first,
because if they work you can use them when recompiling everything.
Some information about how to rebuild can be found in the ReadMe.386
file. If you do rebuild, "make fast" and "make slow" both leave the
new interpreter and compiler in franz/i386/nlisp and cliszt/in-c/nliszt
respectively.
If you're interested in modifying the system, you should e-mail
me, because I can tell you more about how to do it.
Jeff Dalton,
AI Applications Institute, J.Dalton@ed.ac.uk
Edinburgh University.