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From: cox@renoir.Berkeley.EDU (Charles A. Cox)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac,comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Coral/Franz Extended Common Lisp PRESS RELEASE
Message-ID: <20539@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: Wed, 31-Dec-69 18:59:59 EDT
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.20539
Posted: Wed Dec 31 18:59:59 1969
Date-Received: Tue, 8-Sep-87 05:39:49 EDT
References: <334@su-russell.ARPA> <1563@apple.UUCP> <3700@sdcsvax.UCSD.EDU> <1367@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> <1189@mind.UUCP> <5204@j.cc.purdue.edu>
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Reply-To: cox@renoir.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP (Charles A. Cox)
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 51
Summary: Allegro CL is not the same as Franz Lisp
Xref: mnetor comp.sys.mac:6446 comp.lang.lisp:444

>In article <1189@mind.UUCP> eliot@mind.UUCP (Eliot Handleman) writes:
>>I've been working with Franz Lisp on a Minivax 2 over the past year and

It's important not to confuse the two products available from Franz
Inc. in this discussion about the new Coral/Franz Common Lisp (known
as "Allegro CL").  Franz Inc.'s earlier product Franz Lisp is a
dialect of Lisp that precedes Common Lisp and is still being sold and
supported by Franz Inc.  Since it's origins predate Common Lisp, Franz
Lisp is not a Common Lisp (in particular, the interpreter is
dynamically scoped which conflicts with Common Lisp semantics).
However, Franz Lisp is a fairly small Lisp and takes up much less
runtime memory than the Common Lisp products.  Furthermore, many
Common Lisp features and extensions have been added to Franz Lisp.

Franz Lisp is *not* the Lisp product being put on the Macintosh in this
joint Franz Inc/Coral effort.

Allegro CL, the lisp product that *is* being put out by Franz Inc. and
Coral Inc., is a complete Common Lisp with extensions.  Allegro CL is
available now under the mac OS and will also be available under the
Unix OS.

One more thing that may be confusing is that Franz Inc. has recently
renamed its Common Lisp product on other machines from "Extended
Common Lisp" to "Allegro CL".


Now that we're straight on all that, the rest of this note will be about 
the questions regarding Franz Lisp...

>>I'm wondering if any other users have noted difficulties - or bugs -
>>in the following not unsignificant areas:
>>1. the debugger, when called in the break loop, doesn't access the stack
>>   and so is entirely useless. 

There are two debuggers available with Franz Lisp, (debug) which is
contributed software, and, beginning with Opus 40, the default
debugger which is in the top level.  If you have a specific example
where the debugger fails, it may be useful to move this discussion to
comp.lang.lisp.franz.

>>2. Similar problems with step.l, which doesn't do what the manual claims
>>  it should, unless inserted in a fn def.

Beginning with Opus 43.1, there is a new and improved stepper which is part
of the top level.  It seems to fix most of the problems of the previous
steppers, plus adds some new features.


	Charley Cox
	cox@renoir.Berkely.EDU