Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!gatech!hao!ames!ucbcad!ucbvax!dewey.soe.berkeley.edu!oster From: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu.UUCP Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Subject: A Decent Environment. Where is it? Message-ID: <21493@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> Date: Wed, 28-Oct-87 16:17:54 EST Article-I.D.: ucbvax.21493 Posted: Wed Oct 28 16:17:54 1987 Date-Received: Sat, 31-Oct-87 09:55:24 EST Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Reply-To: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu.UUCP (David Phillip Oster) Organization: School of Education, UC-Berkeley Lines: 105 I've been using Lucid Common Lisp + Portable Common Loops + X version 10 on Sun 3/50 and Sun 3/160 hardware, and I am very unhappy with the system. If anyone has any advise, or can tell me how to get software to ameliorate some of my problems, I would truly appreciate it. I'd be happy to switch from Lucid to Franz, if it made a big difference in programmer productivity. (We are using Lucid because our program runs twice as fast under Lucid as Franz, and Franz tends to core dump if you call an X function with incorrect arguments.) 1.) I'm having these problems with the debugger: Has anyone fixed it to allow single-stepping from a breakpoint? (I can set breakpoints, and I can single step, but my problems are all deep within large systems. For the moment, I set a breakpoint, recompile, run, and at the break, compile a fresh version of the function without the breakpoint, laborously call it under the stepper with the same arguments that the break trace shows (using :l 0, :l 1, :l 2 to get the arguments where I can setq them into temporaries.)) Has anyone fixed it to allow continuing the stepper with just a mouse click? (I have to type ":n" now, which is pretty painful.) Has anyone fixed it so that it preserves the names of the local variables? (local 0...n are hard to associate with the names in the original code.) Has anyone fixed PCL so it uses gensyms based on the original method names? (most of the procedures on my backtrace are completely anonymous gensyms.) Has anyone fixed it so I can see data structures, each in its own window, as scrollable list of labelled data field where I can click and type at a data value to change it? I want to edit the stack backtrace as a scrollable list of scrollable lists. Is there a package so that I can examine interlinked data structures as a graph, and edit it by mousing on and dragging the links? Is there anything like the InterLisp advise package, so I can decorate functions with preambles and postambles without having to recompile them? Does anyone have a window based stepper that will show me the current expression, underlined, in an editor window? Does anyone have a decent code profiler? (I want to click on a button, run something, click the button off, and get a graph of the calling tree, with a bar for each function of how often it got called and how much time it took.) 2.) X problems Has anyone fixed X so that it will save the bitmap of my output window and restore it when that window is re-revealed? (My program is still too sick to burden my programming with worrying about redraw events.) (this is in the spec for X v11, but no-one has implemented it, and X v11 is still too rocky for us to convert.) Where is the fix to Xv10 to allow clipboards longer than 512 characters? Actually, this may be more nearly a problem with pipe blockage running processes under emacs. (I'm having problems with Lucid's built-in mini-emacs, but if I run lucid under real emacs, this problem makes it impossible to send a complete function definition to Lucid.) Does anyone have file for emacs for running lisp that maintains the common lisp package environment? 3.) I'm having these problems with Lucid's editor: Has anyone fixed Lucid's built-in mini-emacs so that it doesn't trash my files? (I've had problems with extra text showing up in my source code.) So it doesn't abort if I un-thinkingly edit a directory? (like you can in real emacs.) So you can position the cursor on a function name and have it display the calling sequence in the mini-buffer? So you can position the cursor on a function name and have it display the documentation? the definition? So you can position the cursor on a function name and have it display a list of windows, each window centered on the function who called it? How do I make it command complete my function names? Running under the editor, it doesn't tell me it is garbage collecting until it finishes. I need to know before that so I won't get frustrated by the frequent wait-15-seconds-while-it-garbage-collects. has anyone fixed this? ---------------- I'm not asking for much, just a bare minimum of programmer's tools for doing serious lisp programming on a workstation. I apologize if I'm wasting the net's time and the answers to these requests are already in documentation I have. Please answer by E-mail. I will repost if there is any interest. --- David Phillip Oster --A Sun 3/60 makes a poor Macintosh II. Arpa: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu --A Macintosh II makes a poor Sun 3/60. Uucp: {uwvax,decvax,ihnp4}!ucbvax!oster%dewey.soe.berkeley.edu