Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcsun!ukc!edcastle!aiai!jeff
From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: How do you load/run a lisp program?
Message-ID: <2058@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 15 Mar 90 15:37:50 GMT
References: <275@alix.UUCP> <9090001@hpfcso.HP.COM> <2703@leah.Albany.Edu>
Reply-To: jeff@aiai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton)
Followup-To: comp.lang.lisp.franz
Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Lines: 67

In article <2703@leah.Albany.Edu> ag0531@leah.Albany.Edu (Andy Gallo) writes:
>
>	And how about the debugger?  I began my studies this semester in 
>Common LISP for VAX/VMS.  Now I'd like to switch to Franz LISP on a Unix 
>platform.  However, the online help files are not installed at my site.  Can
>someone tell me:

The following is for the Berkeley version of Franz, roughly Opus 38.92.

>		1) how to exit the debugger back to the lisp prompt

Call (reset) to go all the way back or type <eof> to go back one
level.  The easiest way to get all the way back is usually to type
<eof> until you're there.  To avoid accidently exiting Lisp, however,
you may want to

    (sstatus ignoreeof t)

Then, to exit Lisp you'll have to call (exit).

>		2) how to 'traceback' in the Franz LISP debugger

Call baktrack or showstack.  The funny spelling is from MacLisp.

>		3) what are the important differences between Common and 
>			Franz.  Please not that I am a novice user, so 
>			it is enough just to point out the most common 
>			obvious differences.

1. Franz is oriented towards lower case and is case-sensitive.

2. Franz doesn't have lexical scoping at all in the interpreter and
   has only a restricted form in compiled code.  Local variables in
   compiled code are not dynamically bound but cannot be captured by
   closures.  Indeed, #'(lambda ...) - expressions are compiled as
   completely spearate functions without regard for their context.

3. "defvar" works in Franz and makes the variable everywhere special,
   but top-level declarations are done with "declare" rather than
   "proclaim".

4. The generic arithmetic operations in Franz have names like "plus",
   "times", "difference" and "quotient".  +, *, -, and / are single-
   type operations.  Both args must be fixnums or both must be floats.
   There are no complex numbers or rationals.

5. There is no character data type.  Characters are represented as
   integers or as symbols.

6. Franz doesn't combine lists and vectors as sequences.

7. Things like &optional work only in defun or defmacro, not in
   lambda-expressions.

8. There are no packages.

A good source for information about Franz Lisp is Wilensky's
LISPcraft (not to be confused with his Common LISPcraft).  It
tells you pretty much everything the Franz manual does and in
some cases more.

It is possible to get implementations of Flavors for Franz but
not of CLOS.

Jeff Dalton,                      JANET: J.Dalton@uk.ac.ed             
AI Applications Institute,        ARPA:  J.Dalton%uk.ac.ed@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk
Edinburgh University.             UUCP:  ...!ukc!ed.ac.uk!J.Dalton