[no subject]

[hagiya@kurims.kurims.kyoto-u.junet]

Hi, my name is Masami Hagiya, one of the implementors
of a Common Lisp system called KCL (Kyoto Common Lisp).

This is a kind of test mail to the Common Lisp mailing list
from the UNIX network in Japan, called JUNET.  Unfortunately,
we don't have direct access to ARPA now.


There are many people in Japan who are interested in the
development of Common Lisp.  For example, in last June,
we had a panel discussion on Common Lisp in Information
Processing Society of Japan, whose panelists were:

	Ikuo Takeuchi (NTT)
	Masayuki Ida (Aoyama-Gakuin Univ.)
	Michiaki Yasumura (Hitachi)
	Motoaki Terashima (Denki-Tsushi Univ.)
	Taiichi Yuasa (Kyoto Univ.)

There are also several companies in Japan actually implementing
Common Lisp; I don't know whether I can make their names public
(oops, you can see two names above).


Our Common Lisp system, KCL, is not an evolutional one; our
major concern was

	* faithfulness to CLtL
	* portability
	* compactness and simplicity

rather than the efficiency or the sophisticated debugging system.
The system seems quite comfortable now; it's as efficient
as other systems (or, at least, comparable; please look at the
benchmarks) and although we've implemented all the functions
in CLtL, the system is very small (e.g. KCL/SUN takes only about
1.7 mega).  The most interesting thing is that since the system
is written in C and the compiler is a Lisp-to-C translator,
we can port the system to almost any UNIX (-like) machine.
In fact, KCL now runs on many machines including VAX/4.2BSD,
SUN2, SUN3, 3B2, MV/AOSVS, Apollo.


Articles to the Common Lisp mailing list are now distributed
in Japan via SHASTA-NTTLAB.  Thank you.

Masami Hagiya