A monthly summary of Free ("as in Freedom") CL Hackery news-that-I-know-about. August 2001
For submission information, see the bottom of the page
This month, news of or from cCLan, CLISP, CMUCL, defsystem, langband, LISA, OpenMCL, Bill Schelter and SBCL
cCLan
New/updated packages:cl-partition (20010808) unstable; urgency=low * fourth version of spec, implementation to match ilisp (5.11-1cCLan2) unstable; urgency=low * close both sourceforge bugs 445641 and 448326 langband (0.0.13-1) unstable; urgency=low * Upstream update, see upstream ChangeLog openmcl (0.5-4) unstable; urgency=low * pacify lintian. This package is planned to go into Debian proper sbcl (0.6.13-2) unstable; urgency=low * TRACE on Alpha works * New upstream. INSPECT now works again * Added workaround for (posix-environ) to /etc/sbclrc
CLISP
Today's comp.lang.lisp includes this welcome news
Sam Steingold <sds@gnu.org> writes: > All differences between "clisp -ansi" and ANSI CL are due to lack of > resources. We will gladly accept patches and constructive > discussion towards full .ANSI compliance.
I don't know if this is a shift in policy or just in emphasis, but either way it was surely the catalyst for millions of CLISP users worldwide to immediately rush to their editors and produce patches for the clisp man page reworking the description of the -a (maximum ANSI compliance) option to avoid terms like "broken" and "not useful for actual work". And to make it the default, of course.
Wasn't it? I hope it was ...
CLISP hackers are presently making active efforts to fix up ANSI noncompliances in their pathname support - in fact, their present development version apparently passes more of the tests in Christophe Rhodes' pathname test suite than CMUCL 18c does.
CMUCL
The CMUCL download site and CVS repo has been off the net recently due to an office move due to their colocation provider getting bought by Wind River. (I think that's the approximate causal chain, anyway). They now have a new provider of internet service and a new box to consume it, so they estimate that their new server will be back on the net in maybe a couple of weeks.
In the meantime, mirrors of the download area have been set up:
defsystem
According to rumour, asdf ("Another System Definition Facility") is reputed to cope with about 90% of the system definitions used in cCLan, which probably means it's time to give it to a wider audience to play with. You can find it in cCLan CVS.
langband
Langband is a Lisp implementation of the famous Angband game. Version 0.0.13 was released on August 5th: new features include:LISA
LISA - Lisp Intelligent Software Agents - is a production rule system for Common Lisp. Its purpose is to provide extensive support for the development of intelligent applications, including reasoning-capable software agents. LISA employs a CLOS implementation of Rete and is based on CLIPS and JESS Just in time for this editing of FTXT, David Young has announced availability of the first production release. "The most significant new feature in Version 1.0 is full support for rule redefinition within a running inference engine."
OpenMCL
The Debian system is about to gain another CL compiler when OpenMCL packages are uploaded. These will be based on (if not identical to) the existing cCLan packages (q.v.)
Bill Schelter
Bill Schelter, the force behind gcl and free Macsyma (Maxima), has died. This note was posted to the Maxima mailing list:
Richard Fateman fateman@cs.berkeley.edu Tue, 21 Aug 2001 11:20:39 -0700 Friends: Maxima/GCL users: I heard from a colleague, and then confirmed via Prof Robert Boyer at UTexas, that Bill Schelter died. The last message I saw, sent from Russia, was dated July 26. Here is the note I received from Bob Boyer... .................... It is so very sad but true, Bill Schelter has died. Bill went to Moscow, this summer, got married, and died of a heart attack at the end of July. He was buried in Canada a few weeks ago. His wife is named Olga Vodianikova, but I don't have an address for her. His daughter can be reached at Mike and Karen Schelter Lewis 1705 Autumn Fire Drive Cedar Park, TX 78613 His son Johh, a med student, can also be reached at that address. From what little I know, Prof. Michael Artin, artin@math.mit.edu, may be the person most up-to-date on the details of the story. Sincerely, Bob Boyer .............. Richard Fateman
SBCL
In a major feat of scheduling stupidity, I decided to embark on two
SBCL projects at once at the same time as
More SBCL: a Common-Lisp-Controllerized SBCL package will be a part of Debian GNU/Linux, just as soon as I get one or two of the details in the packaging straightened out.
More more SBCL: want to write inline assembly in Lisp? here's how.
"Free The X3J Thirteen" is compiled once a month by me (Daniel Barlow) from news that I know about. If you're associated with a free CL project that's under-represented here, all you have to do is send me news so that I know about it. Email me! I'd especially like to hear news from CLISP and OpenMCL people because I don't often have time to follow that myself