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From: pf@islington-terrace.csc.ti.com (Paul Fuqua)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ti.explorer
Subject: Re: Do people still use Explorers?
Message-ID: <2868988531-10718790@Islington-Terrace>
Date: 30 Nov 90 21:15:31 GMT
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    Date: Wednesday, November 28, 1990  4:25pm (CST)
    From: agate!shelby!neon!lucid.com!jwz at apple.com  (Jamie Zawinski)
    Subject: Re: Do people still use Explorers?

    I think TAGS tables suck.  Both conceptually and in the current implementation.
    I could go on and on...

A lot of stuff you get for free from the integration of tools in a lispm
(like m-. without tag-tables) you often have to do in a roundabout way
on a Unix Lisp.

One of the best examples is something called ilisp, a gnuemacs package
built on the CMU comint stuff that provides a reasonable Lisp listener
and editor commands, and calls on the inferior Lisp for things like
arglists, source-file-names, and the like.  It's not a bad imitation of
the Zmacs/listener combination, but it has to work hard to do it.
    
    Also all of the GNU Emacs mail readers are substantially more lame.

I agree.  Even though I've made rmail behave much like the Explorer mail
reader (and both much like Babyl), I find rmail much more fragile --
it frequently duplicates the whole header while reforming if it sees
something it doesn't like.
    
    Pale imitations at best, and really slow from what I've seen...  The
    Lispms have the state-of-the-art in development environments, even though
    they're going the way of the dinosaurs.

A group I've worked with looked at SPE, Composer, and Harlequin, and
while Harlequin looks by far the best, none of them have (to my mind)
decent debuggers.  I don't care about fancy windows and displays -- I
don't use the lispm window-debugger at all -- but I do want to be able
to grab and manipulate the args and locals, force returns from stack
frames, restart calls with new arguments, and look at the disassembled
code.  I haven't found any Unix Lisp that lets me do all of them.

Then there's speed -- my 25 MHz, 24 MB Explorer 2 still beats a
neighbor's SparcStation 330 (32 MB, Harlequin, native CLOS) on a
cut-down version of a simulation I've been writing.  The 330 is about
80% of the Explorer for this example, but the Explorer processor is four
years old.
    
									     And it
    > will always live with 8-bit characters, which is a loss from the 12-bit LISPM
    > characters.

It is forever annoying that I can't do c-m-rubout (Backward Kill Sexp)
in gnuemacs -- there's no c-rubout to put a meta modifier on.
    
    Do any of you have Explorers at home?  I've often considered buying a used one
    to play with, but I'm a bit concerned about power/temperature requirements, 
    and availability of spare parts.  Anyone have any comments?

Power and temperature should be okay, since it was designed for an
office environment.  We ran two (five bricks, total) off a 20-amp
circuit in a conference room, but I wouldn't recommend it (we popped the
breaker when someone else fired up a NeXT on the same circuit).

I've thought about buying the one on my desk when it's replaced.  Except
for the processor and the second brick, it's 5+ years old, so it should
be depreciated down to nothing.  On the other hand, it's been years
since the last hardware failure, so maybe everything's about to break.

Paul Fuqua                     pf@csc.ti.com, ti-csl!pf
Texas Instruments Computer Science Center, Dallas, Texas

"I f***ed up."  "Yes, but you gave it 100% effort."  -- Mystic Pizza