[HAUTIN@RUTGERS.ARPA: common lisp]

[Charles Hedrick <HEDRICK@RUTGERS.ARPA>]

I decided you might be interested in the full text of the request that I
alluded to before.

In case any of your are curious, the answer to the first question is
that Tops-20 Common Lisp runs.  It is fairly complete.  However currently
there is no compiler.  It should be finished by late fall.  It will
probably compile the full language by the end of the summer, but without
doing the sorts of optimizations one would like.  The Tops-20
implementation is based on CMU's Spice Lisp, as is DEC's VAX
implementation.  At the moment it looks like we will support it from
here.  We are a bit uncertain what sort of demand there is for a new
DEC-20 language at this late date.  If a significant number of customers
want (and will pay for) real support, we and DEC would be happy to
arrange that.  We just don't know whether there will be sufficient
demand for this to set up a real support organization.  DEC-20 Lisp is
not based on the VAX sources.  However we are looking at what the VAX
implementors have done, and will try to supply a reasonable degree of
compatibility in the language.

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Mail-From: HAUTIN created at 22-Jun-84 09:32:06
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 1984 13:32:00 -0000
From: HAUTIN@RUTGERS.ARPA
Subject: common lisp
To: hedrick@RUTGERS.ARPA
cc: hautin@RUTGERS.ARPA
Original-language: French
Translated-by: hedrick@RUTGERS.ARPA

Hello,

I would like to ask some questions about Common Lisp.

1) How is your project going?
	Does your compiler work yet?
	Will there be DEC support? (DEC keeps pushing back availability
		for VAX Common Lisp.)

2) What will be the impact of Common Lisp on other American research
	groups, for example Yale, Berkeley, Xerox, and BBN?

3) We here at CNET would like to standardize on a Lisp for
	    VAX 11/780
	    IBM 3083 with VM/CMS and/or UNIX/UTS
	    SM90 UNIX/68000 (This is a multi-processor machine 
			     developed by CNET)

4) At the moment we use NIL from MIT on the VAX.  We are generally quite
pleased with it.
   For IBM we don't have anything
   For the SM90 we have LELISP from INRIA, but it has a few problems
	(separate compilation, an enviornment that is not as good as
	NIL's)

5) Would it be possible to get a Common Lisp compiler that we could port
to these machines?  or if not, at least a compiler that we could look at
that is based on the Common Lisp specification?

I would be very grateful if you could help us with these various problems.

Do you know of a bboard about Smalltalk?  At the University of Brest a
group has implemented Smalltalk for our SM90 system.  They would be
quite interested in comparing their implementation with others.  Their
implementation currently works.  They are now working on performance
improvements.


Thank you,
F Hautin
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