Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!crdgw1!uunet!bu.edu!encore!pierson From: pierson@encore.com (Dan L. Pierson) Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Subject: Re: Flavours of Lisp Message-ID: Date: 25 Apr 91 14:47:10 GMT References: <1991Apr24.123457.24123@cns.umist.ac.uk> <1991Apr25.050856.14219@Think.COM> Sender: news@Encore.COM Organization: Encore Computer Corporation Lines: 43 Nntp-Posting-Host: xenna.encore.com In-reply-to: barmar@think.com's message of 25 Apr 91 05:08:56 GMT Regarding Re: Flavours of Lisp; barmar@think.com (Barry Margolin) adds: > In article <1991Apr24.123457.24123@cns.umist.ac.uk> me@cns.umist.ac.uk (Martin Earl) writes: >>KCL is Kyoto common lisp and is PD/generally available? > Right. >>AKCL is KCL with extras from Austin ? What's the availability on this >>one? Purchase? Ftp from somewhere? or what? > I think AKCL is free. There's also Ibuki Common Lisp, which I think is a > commercial derivative of KCL (someone please correct me if I'm wrong). Both KCL and AKCL are available for anonymous ftp from rascal.ics.utexas.edu. KCL is controlled by a free license; you are required to sign a copy of this and put it in the mail before you ftp the sources (yes, this is an honor system; the license is also available for ftp, probably in the README file). The only annoying clause in the license is one that prohibits you from distributing modified versions of KCL; among other things, this means you can't distributed bug-fixed binaries to your customers (but see below). AKCL is free and built on top of the public KCL sources. You get both, then the AKCL makefile applies a bunch of patches (in its own format) to copies of the KCL sources and builds AKCL. This circumvents the license restriction. AKCL has many more features than KCL, and comes with working (?) ports for many more machines. IBCL (Ibuki Common Lisp) is a commercial product based on the original KCL. The current version has roughly the same external features but significantly different internals. The main thrust of IBCL is *much* tighter integration with the C world. Ibuki seems to be ahead of everyone else in such areas as making the entire Lisp runtime a Unix shared library. -- dan In real life: Dan Pierson, Encore Computer Corporation, Research UUCP: {talcott,linus,necis,decvax}!encore!pierson Internet: pierson@encore.com