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Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!harpo!floyd!clyde!ihnp4!inuxc!pur-ee!uiucdcs!smu!leff
From: leff@smu.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.micro
Subject: Re: Wanted: AI Software - (nf)
Message-ID: <3834@uiucdcs.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 14-Nov-83 05:21:12 EST
Article-I.D.: uiucdcs.3834
Posted: Mon Nov 14 05:21:12 1983
Date-Received: Tue, 15-Nov-83 05:46:30 EST
Lines: 53

#R:uicsl:7000032:smu:14300001:000:2507
smu!leff    Nov 12 11:33:00 1983

The one thing you may have thought of or some other people will
tell you about is the mulisp/mustar Artificial Intelligence Development
System which is written by the Soft Warehouse
P. O. Box 11174
Honolulu, Hawaii 96828 
and is being sold by Microsoft
and numerous mailorder suppliers.  See some comments about micro
discount retailers floating about this net that I saw recently.

We have been using it on the IBM PC and the TI PC but a version
is available for the CPM environment.  The LISP itself is
reasonable.  There are two libraries which emulate INTERLISP and
MACLISP.  I doubt that they would allow one to take a reasonable
program written in either of those dialects and convert them easily
but they do provide a reasonable amount of syntactic sugar and
facilities for doing frequent things like SOME, MAPCAN, MAPCAR etc.

You probably will find yourself editing these libraries taking the
functions you need.  One nice feature of this approach is that you
can read the code and insert debugging statements in these functions
if they seem to be acting up or not acting the way you expect them to.

The thing supports an integrated text edited 'MUSTAR.'  It uses some
of the control keys from WORDSTAR which will be helpful if you alread
use WORDSTAR for your word processing.  It's main problems are:
  a) total lack of error handling.
     Many of our users lost files by typing X to exit from DOS instead
     of some other command.  The machine doesn't catch errors like that
     or update a disk file.  Also, you can easily do a Read instead
     of a write, etc.  
  b) If you should try and insert enough characters into a line to make
     it into a line greater than eighty characters, you get weird
     screw-ups instead of a more reasonable response like breaking
     the line up, beeping at your or even simply truncating the line.
  
The computer currently supports a variety of terminals and you can
customize the editor for another terminal by rewriting a few
LISP functions.  We have customized our LISP for the TI reasonably
successfully.

The documentation is reasonable.  HOwever, note that you can use
the notation ] to close multiple parentheses even though we weren't
able to find a statement to that effect.

The thing will work nicely if you only have one diskette. I don't know
if that is the case.

You also might consider MUSIMP which is the thing there math package
runs in.  It is simply a LISP with a nice syntax.  The functions
seem to correspond item for item.