A monthly summary of Free ("as in Freedom") CL Hackery news-that-I-know-about. November 2001
This month: ECL/ECLS, cl-utils, slashdot, Arc, CMUCL tools, LISA, cCLan packages
For submission information, see the bottom of the page
ECLS split from ECL about a year ago, and now rejoins. Although the move was announced as a merger, it might be more appropriately termed a reverse takeover: ECLS takes the ECL name but otherwise continues to be the same project as it was last month
This change implies the following modifications in the code
- The executables, headers and libraries are renamed accordingly. Therefore, the program name becomes "ecl"
- For compatibility reasons, both #+ECL and #+ECLS will be supported.
- The sys::build-ecls routine which builds new executables has been renamed to sys::build-program
Unfortunately the name ECL at SourceForge has been already picked by a somebody working on a new implementation of the C language. That means that, until a better solution is found, the home page of the project will remain http://ecls.sourceforge.net
After the initial comp.lang.lisp work on SPLIT-SEQUENCE (formerly PARTITION) the cl-utils project is gathering momentum. The focus is on small utilities which are often invented independently by proficient Lispers and could usefully be part of a layered standard; some of them are portably implementable, others would benefit from, or require, direct implementation support.
cl-utils development is conducted mostly on the comp.lang.lisp newsgroup. URLs for Google archives of the relevant threads, and work-in-progress specifications, can often be found on CLiki: http://ww.telent.net/cliki/Common%20Lisp%20Utilities
This relates to Common Lisp, but not exclusively to free software: kmp answered selected Slashdotters' questions in some detail. So much detail, in fact, that the article was longer than an internal limit in the Slashdot database, and had to be posted in two halves. Part I and Part II
For balance, then, this relates to free software but not entirely to Common Lisp: Paul Graham (author of the books ANSI Common Lisp and On Lisp, and creator of the Viaweb application which later became Yahoo Store) is designing a new Lisp dialect called Arc, intended for server-side Web applications.
A Language for Good Programmers
- Target user: opposite of Java.
- Programmable programming language.
- By default, allow.
- The language I wish someone would make for me.
- Brevity (what you like about abstraction)
The CMUCL implementors are planning a new version 18d for early next year. This would be a good time to report any bugs in/patches for 18c if you have them lying around.
Matthew Danish has created Line-Reader, "Readline-like" support for the CMUCL and SBCL top-level loops. This feature (as seen in GNU CLISP) is commonly asked for by new users
Paul Foley has a CMUCL interface to Berkeley DB, available from http://www.actrix.gen.nz/users/mycroft/cl.html
An interesting thread on the cmucl-help mailing list led to the development by Pierre Mai of a highly optimized MD5 implementation for CMUCL: see http://www.pmsf.de/pmai/MD5.html
Work continues on a preliminary version of LISA's query language. To simplify things the first release will function only with CLOS instances in the knowledge base; once we've blessed the implementation we'll determine how to address queries and deftemplates
http://www.geocrawler.com/archives/3/7057/2001/11/0/7181627/
** cl-fare-md5 - An implementation of the MD5 message digest protocol.
cl-fare-md5 (20011109-1) unstable; urgency=low
* Bug fix for SBCL (package name discrepancy wrt CMUCL).
** cl-split-sequence - A community-standardized CL function to split sequences
cl-split-sequence (20011114-1) unstable; urgency=low
* Name change effected.
* partition{,-if{,-not}} are deprecated. Everything should carry on
working, but this may change in a later version.
** clg - Common Lisp bindings to Gtk+
clg (20011111-2) unstable; urgency=low
* If you get compilation errors with CMUCL, please see README.Debian
* Updated to include nicer logic for finding paths.
** clocc-port - The Common Lisp library 'port' from CLOCC.
clocc-port (0.1-20011103-1) unstable; urgency=low
* Updated it from upstream with better naming of internal modules of the
port system. Allows it to use more of the source directly.
* Renamed the name of the system to :port from :clocc-port
** common-lisp-controller - This is a common lisp source and compiler manager.
* Fixes c-compile-file breakage.
"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