Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
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From: jeff@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Subject: Re: It's been some years... please update me..
Message-ID: <DKo9AL.M4o.0.macbeth@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
Organization: Centre for Cognitive Science, Edinburgh, UK
References: <30DB9A0B.1846@awinc.com> <DK1MvD.n34@SDF.LONESTAR.ORG>
Date: Thu, 4 Jan 1996 19:39:56 GMT
Lines: 34

In article <DK1MvD.n34@SDF.LONESTAR.ORG> df@SDF.LONESTAR.ORG (Daniel Finster) writes:
>
>The only other decent Lisp environment (that I know of anyways) for
>toy computers is MCL for the Macintosh (and MAc would be less
>stressful to use anyways (especially if you put a MacIvory in it =)).
>
>    you will direct me to Allegro (I browsed their web page) and I am
>
>I've heard good things and bad things about Palegro.  But I'm also
>predjudiced because Franz Lisp used to be one of the slowest compilers
>available (I don't know if they've changed), has only recently gone to
>Common Lisp (they had their own warped dialect, sortof like MACLISP
>without balls), and are rooted in BSD Eunuchs technology.  Yuck.

Much of what you say there is wrong, though there are grains of
truth.

Franz Inc has had a Common Lisp for many years now.  They have
*not* "only recently" gone to Common Lisp.  So far as I know,
their CL compiler is not especially slow.

It's true that Franz Lisp was sortof like MacLisp (not just
sortof: it even had hunks).  It's also true that it had a
connection to BSD.  Indeed, Franz Lisp was distributed as
part of 4.1 and 4.2 BSD.  The Franz Lisp compiler was not
especially slow.

Initially, Franz Inc supplied a commercial, extended version of
Franz Lisp.  A Common Lisp (a separate implementation, not a
modified Franz) was not long behind, and the Franz Lisp side
gradually diminished.  (I don't know whether they still supply
it or not.)

-- jd
