Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!rutgers!clyde!cbosgd!osu-cis!tut!welch
From: welch@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu (Arun Welch)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Ada,Lisp,Flames
Message-ID: <5493@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>
Date: 28 Jan 88 20:20:30 GMT
References: <5084@well.UUCP>
Organization: The Ohio State University Dept of Computer and Information Science
Lines: 71


>6.  Xerox Common Lisp.  MIA (Missing In Action).  Apparently still
>not ready to release.  **Rumor** has it that Xerox will abandon
>CL running on their own hardware and OEM Sun Sparc architecture
>running one of the above.  (Repeat;  **rumor**).


MIA? Xerox Common Lisp was released in August.  By now, it's even been
released in Europe to Rank Xerox sites. Xerox and Sun announced in
October that they are moving all Xerox products off of Xerox's custom
hardware to Suns SPARC architecture. This includes XDE, the XNS
services, Xerox Lisp, Viewpoint, and so on.  This information was
rather widely publicised, it's not a rumor.

>1.  NIL, featured prominently on the cover of Steele, was stillborn.  MIT,
>the birthplace of Lisp, unable to produce a Common Lisp.

I don't know what you mean by stillborn. I used it for about 2 years,
and I know of other people in other parts of the country who did too,
both at educational institutions as well as commercial sites.

>2.  CMU is the only university to produce an effectively Steele-complete
>version of CL, aka Spice.  (I don't know how complete Hedrick's DEC-20
>Common Lisp is.  Charles?)

I've used Hedrick's DEC-20 CL, and haven't found any defficiencies. If
it's missing something, it's not in the documentation as being
missing, nor is it a major enough thing to be critical.

Amazingly enough, you're also missing a rather large contender in the
field: TI. They're doing quite well selling their Explorrer II's and
LX's, and are rumored to be about to announce a plug-in board for the
Mac II which is about half way between the Explorer I and the Explorer
II in performance. Not to mention that their lisp chip is gonna have
all kinds of interesting applications in other parts of their
organisation. In fact, last I heard, Explorer II's were back-ordered a
couple of months.  To find TI missing from your list is pretty
amazing. Or is it because you can't find anything bad to say about
them?

Yet another vendor missing from your list is HP. I haven't used HP's
CL, so I can't comment on it.

And another vendor out there is Ibuki, who are marketing a supported,
enhanced version of KCL. Another case of my not having used it enough
to comment on it.

And another vendor missing from your list is BBN ACI, who report quite
good sales of their Butterfly SCheme, and will probably report even
better sales of Butterfly Lisp (which is being developed on HP
Bobcats, so HP must have a pretty good Lisp...). Yes, BBN ACI recently
re-organised, but that was to accomodate expansion, not retrenching
for a loss of market. Butterfly Lisp is waiting on Mach to come out on
the Butterfly, so it's not expected out until June. 

Lisp development seems to be going along pretty well in a number of
organisations. How else can you explain the emergence of CLOS and CLX,
one as an actual standard, and the other which will probably develop
into a de facto standard, with people already writing toolkit's for
both of them (as evidenced by TI's CLUE and Xerox's PCL-Environment).

There seems to be a lot missing from your flame, not to mention some
disinformation... I hope your article in AI Expert doesn't reflect
more of the same...

...arun

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Arun Welch
Lisp Systems Programmer, Lab For AI Research, Ohio State University
welch@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu