From: Martin J. Zaidel
Subject: Re: How is CMU CL compared with commercial CL?
Date:
Message-ID: <54116@netnews.upenn.edu>
In article <······················@cs.cmu.edu>,
···@sef-pmax.slisp.cs.cmu.edu writes:
|> We've also got CLM running, sort of, and are
|>planning some improvements to that code to make it work better in the
|>context of CMU CL.
Forgive my ignorance, but what is CLM?
Martin J. Zaidel * If a train station is where a train stops,
==> ······@cis.upenn.edu * what happens at a workstation?
*
From: Thomas Berlage
Subject: Re: How is CMU CL compared with commercial CL?
Date:
Message-ID: <6047@gmdzi.gmd.de>
In article <············@early-bird.think.com>, ······@think.com (Barry Margolin) writes:
> In article <···················@liasun5.epfl.ch> ·····@liasun6.epfl.ch writes:
> > We cannot use it CLM is tied to OSF/Motif(TM), which costs money and
> > prevents us from freely distributing the programs that we would
> > develop using CLM.
> >
> > CLM would be a tad more useful for many people if it could use a
> > free widget set instead of OSF/Motif(TM), for example the Athena
> > widgets which are contained in the free MIT X11 distribution.
>
> That's a valid concern. Of course, the "M" in "CLM" stands for "Motif"; it
> exists for the use of people who *want* to implement Motif-based
> applications in Lisp. And CLM isn't the only GUI library for Lisp.
>
> I haven't looked at CLM, but I imagine the underlying architecture isn't
> really tied to a particular widget set. The innovative part of this
> software is the daemon implementation and the communication protocol. It
> would probably be pretty straight-forward to modify it to use a different
> widget set.
It should not be too difficult to port CLM to any Xt-based toolkit, as most
of the code is table driven or simple cut-and-paste. CLM is freely
distributable, so any volunteers are welcome.
However, there was a reason why we selected Motif instead of Athena as our
base. We wanted to create a higher level of functionality and abstraction
(i.e. our application framework GINA) on top of a toolkit. Motif has a
richer functionality than Athena and is maintained by OSF with a
commitment to backward compatibility. Therefore, after an initial investment,
we can forget about the toolkit (well, at least in theory :-).
Motif is currently bundled with most NEW hardware except Suns (btw. we use
Suns). Only few people complain that UNIX is not free, because it is
included in the price of your machine. However, we understand the concerns
about Motif prices, we would be happy if it were free, but we do not have
the manpower to make our software toolkit-independent.
By the way, I will be on Brad Myers' UI toolkit panel on the Lisp Users and
Vendors Conference next week (Gaithersburg, MD, contact Laura Lotz,
215/651-0936) where we can discuss this kind of question.
Thomas Berlage (·······@gmdzi.gmd.de)
GMD (German National Research Center for Computer Science)
P.O. Box 1240, 5205 Sankt Augustin 1, Germany