From: Dave Touretzky
Subject: two free Lisp tools for educational use
Date:
Message-ID: <6114@pt.cs.cmu.edu>
This note explains how to obtain two FREE Lisp educational tools called
SDRAW and DTRACE. The tools are used extensively in my new Lisp book,
"Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation", published
last month by Benjamin/Cummings. This is a totally revised and improved
version of my previous Lisp book; even the publisher has changed. But
anyway, about the free tools:
SDRAW is a totally portable read-eval-draw loop that evaluates Lisp
expressions and draws the result as a cons cell diagram on the screen. It
has proven especially valuable for teaching beginners the differences
between CONS, LIST, and APPEND.
DTRACE is an enhanced Common Lisp tracing tool that offers a more detailed
and readable display than the trace packages most implementations provide.
It is very useful for teaching recursion and applicative operators. The
book contains examples of how to use each tool, as well as source listings
for the generic versions. (But you DON'T have to buy the book to get the
software. Read on.)
There are five versions of each tool. The generic version will run in any
legal Common Lisp implementation. There are also enhanced versions
specialized for Lucid Lisp, CMU Common Lisp, Golden Common Lisp version 1,
and Golden Common Lisp version 3. The CMU and Lucid versions of SDRAW use
CLX calls to produce nice X11 graphics. The two Golden Common Lisp
versions of SDRAW and DTRACE accomplish the same effect using the IBM
graphic character set. Both tools can easily be ported to other Lisp
implementations.
There are two ways to obtain this free software. First, you can use
anonymous FTP. Open an FTP connection to B.GP.CS.CMU.EDU, login as user
anonymous (any password), cd to directory /usr/dst/public/lisp, and grab
the README file. Then take whatever other files are appropriate to your
Lisp implementation. Note: you won't be able to access any other
directories except the one just mentioned, so you should cd to it directly.
If you don't have FTP access, another way to obtain the software for free
is to write to the Benjamin/Cummings Publishing Company, 390 Bridge
Parkway, Redwood City, CA 94065. They will send you all five versions on
one 5.25 inch IBM PC-format floppy disk. My understanding is that they
will send a disk to anyone who claims to have bought the book; no proof of
purchase is necessary. Benjamin/Cummings is a division of Addison-Wesley,
so if you're a faculty type you should also be able to get the diskette
from your local A-W sales representative. It has its own ISBN number:
0-8053-0493-2.
Feedback on these tools is welcome. Send mail to ···@cs.cmu.edu.
PS: If you want to port the software to other Lisps, you'll want to look in
Appendices A and B of the book for advice on how to do this.
--
Dave Touretzky / School of Computer Science
···@cs.cmu.edu / Carnegie Mellon University
--
Dave Touretzky / School of Computer Science
···@cs.cmu.edu / Carnegie Mellon University