From: ·····@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu.UUCP
Subject: A Decent Environment. Where is it?
Date: 
Message-ID: <21493@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
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<return>" 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: ·····@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu --A Macintosh II makes a poor Sun 3/60.
Uucp: {uwvax,decvax,ihnp4}!ucbvax!oster%dewey.soe.berkeley.edu

From: ····@zodiac.UUCP
Subject: Re: A Decent Environment. Where is it? (some flame, some advice)
Date: 
Message-ID: <8710301944.AA17276@ADS.ARPA>
In article <·····@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> you write:
>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.
>

No kidding.

>If anyone has any advise, or can tell me how to get software to ameliorate
>some of my problems, I would truly appreciate it.
>

So would I.  My advice is buy a *REAL* Lisp Machine (i.e. Symbolics)

>(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.)
>

Sorry for the flipness of this reply.  I have also been struggling with
the SUN environment (FRANZ and GNUEMACS) and I ***HATE*** it.  Where the
····@@ is the window inspector, the flavor examiner, etc. 

Seriously, I find that using Gnuemacs' inferior lisp mode (aptly named when
referring to Franz or Lucid) to communicate to Franz is marginally
acceptable.  I make my Emacstool window as wide as the entire screen and
almost as tall and then split it in two using c-x 5.  I then do a 
M-x run-lisp (I've modified the emacs variable "inferior-lisp-program"
so that run-lisp runs Franz instead of Lucid).  Now I can cut and paste from
either the Lisp buffer or any other buffer.  I use C-m-x to send function
definitions from gnuemacs to the inferior-lisp buffer.  I haven't sent
very large functions but Franz seems to be reading a temp file so my
guess is that there shouldn't be any size limitation.

By the way, make sure to use Emacstool so that Emacs will know about
the mouse.  I find Gnuemacs enticing because the source is available.
I haven't hacked the sources much yet but the fact that I can makes a
big difference.  After working in Symbolics Release 6 for two years,
I'm spoiled by the availability of source code.  Too bad Symbolics is
becoming secretive.  I'm beginning to think that Stallman and the Free
Software Foundation are not so bonkers after all.  But that's the
topic for a different flame.


>
>----------------
>I'm not asking for much, just a bare minimum of programmer's tools
>for doing serious lisp programming on a workstation.

Clearly, you're asking for more than most computer manufacturer's are
willing to deliver.  Pity the poor programmers of conventional languages
who don't even EXPECT this level of support, let alone get it.
Once again, buy a Symbolics.  (Maybe, just maybe, Sun's SPE will be an
acceptable improvement whenever it shows up).

>
>--- David Phillip Oster            --A Sun 3/60 makes a poor Macintosh II.
>Arpa: ·····@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu --A Macintosh II makes a poor Sun 3/60.

Neither even qualifies as a poor Symbolics.



-- 


Richard F. Shu

Today, the Fulda Gap.
Tomorrow, the world.
From: Chan Benson
Subject: Re: Re: A Decent Environment. Where is it? (some flame, some advice)
Date: 
Message-ID: <2630001@hpfcmp.HP.COM>
It doesn't do you much good since you're running on a Sun, but take a
look at HP's Common Lisp environment running on our Series 300 Unix
workstations sometime.  The Emacs based NMODE environment has much of
the debugging and development tools that are missing in the Lucid
environment on Sun.  It's not as window oriented as a Symbolics and at
the moment it doesn't have Flavors or access to X (since it runs in HP's
proprietary windowing system), but it's lots better than the other
workstation offerings in terms of programming features.

Any unbiased HP Lisp users from the grants program care to comment? If
you have any specific questions about features, e-mail them and I'll
try and answer.

			-- Chan Benson
			HP Fort Collins
			(303) 229-3892
			{ihnp4|hplabs}!hpfcla!chan