This message announces the release of CMU Common Lisp 15e for SPARCstation or
Sun4 machines running SunOS.
Release notes for CMU Common Lisp 15e, 25 February 92
15e is mainly a bug-fix release; it will probably be the last version 15
release, and is thus the most stable system you're going to see for a while.
We're reluctant to call it a "default" release because some things are stably
broken:
-- There still isn't any good stack overflow detection. Probably stack
overflow detection won't appear until the C code rewrite associated with
generational GC comes out (version 17 or later.)
-- The Alien/foreign function call mechanism is fairly broken. It doesn't
work at all in interpreted code, and DEF-C-ROUTINE doesn't work properly
for many argument type signatures. We've redesigned and reimplemented
our foreign interface for version 16.
We are now distributing the CMU CL user manual in Gnu Info format (in
doc/cmu-user.info.) You can either have your EMACS maintainer install this in
the info root, or you can use the info "g(<cmucl root dir>/doc/cmu-user.info)"
command. Many thanks to Mike Clarkson (the LaTeXinfo maintainer) who
volunteered to convert our Scribe documents.
Changes:
-- Improved recursive error handling. Errors during reporting of errors are
detected and suppressed. Other recursive errors are eventually detected,
and hopefully recovered from. This should eliminate some "recursive map
failure (stack overflow?)" errors.
-- Fixed a bad declaration in CLX which caused an array index error on
font attribute queries (such as CHAR-WIDTH.)
-- Fixed interpreted (typep x '(and ...)) to not always return NIL.
-- Fixed interpreted CLOS methods to work once again.
-- Fixed PROFILE to work again, now that argument count information may be
missing.
-- Changed NCONC to signal an error if a non-null ATOM appears other than
as the last argument.
-- Changed FEATUREP to signal an error if it is passed a list form with a
strange CAR.
-- Do type checking on the arguments to %PUTHASH so that
(setf (gethash foo 'bar) x) doesn't get a bus error.
-- Changed LET* and &AUX to allow duplicate variable names.
-- Fixed DEFTYPE to properly invalidate type system caches so that type
redefinitions predictably take effect.
-- Improvements to MIPS disassembler database.
The rest of this message is derived from the cmucl(1) man page and the README
file.
Robert A. MacLachlan (···@cs.cmu.edu)
________________________________________________________________________
Sun Release 4.1 1
CMUCL(1) USER COMMANDS CMUCL(1)
NAME
CMU Common Lisp
DESCRIPTION
CMU Common Lisp is public domain "industrial strength" Com-
mon Lisp programming environment. Many of the X3j13 changes
have been incorporated into CMU CL. Wherever possible, this
has been done so as to transparently allow use of either
CLtL1 or proposed ANSI CL. Probably the new features most
interesting to users are SETF functions, LOOP and the WITH-
COMPILATION-UNIT macro.
HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS
CMU CL is currently available for Sparcstations and DECsta-
tions (pmaxes) running Mach (or OSF/1). We are beta-testing
a SunOS SPARC version and an IBM RT Mach version. At least
16 megabytes of memory and 25 megabytes of disk space are
recommended. As usual, more is better.
SUPPORT
Bug reports should be sent to ··········@cs.cmu.edu. Please
consult your local CMU CL maintainer or Common Lisp expert
to verify that the problem really is a bug before sending to
this list.
We have insufficient staffing to provide extensive support
to people outside of CMU. We are looking for university and
industrial affiliates to help us with porting and mainte-
nance for hardware and software that is not widely used at
CMU.
OVERVIEW
When compared other Common Lisp implementations (such as
Allegro), CMU CL has two broad advantages:
-- The new CMU CL compiler (Python) is more sophisticated
than other Common Lisp compilers. It both produces
better code and is easier to use.
-- The programming environment based on the Hemlock editor
is better integrated than gnu-emacs based environments.
(Though you can still use GNU if you want.)
CMU CL also has significant non-technical advantages:
-- It has good local support for CMU users, and is well
integrated with the CMU CS environment.
-- It is public domain, and is freely available to non-CMU
sites that aren't able to afford a site-license for a
commercial Lisp.
COMPILER FEATURES
The `Advanced Compiler' chapter of the User's manual exten-
sively discusses Python's optimization capabilities (See
DOCUMENTATION below.) Here are a few high points:
-- Good efficiency and type-checking at the same time. Com-
piling code safe gives a 2x speed reduction at worst.
-- In safe code, type declarations are verified, allowing
declarations to be debugged in safe code. When you go to
compile unsafe, you know the declarations are right.
-- Full source level debugging of compiled code, including
display of the exact call that got an error.
-- Good efficiency notes that tell you why an operation
can't be open coded or where you are number-consing, and
that provide unprecedented source context
-- Block compilation, partial evaluation, lightweight func-
tions and proper tail-recursion allow low-cost use of
function call abstraction.
___________________________________________________________________________
This software is "as is", and has no warranty of any kind. CMU and the authors
assume no responsibility for the consequences of any use of this software. See
doc/release-notes.txt for a description of the state of the release you have.
See "man cmucl" (man/man1/cmucl.1) for other general information.
Distribution:
CMU Common Lisp is only available via anonymous FTP. We don't have the
manpower to make tapes. These are our distribution machines:
lisp-rt1.slisp.cs.cmu.edu (128.2.217.9)
lisp-rt2.slisp.cs.cmu.edu (128.2.217.10)
Log in with the user "anonymous" and ·········@host" as password (i.e. your
EMAIL address.) When you log in, the current directory should be set to the
CMU CL release area. If you have any trouble with FTP access, please send mail
to ·····@cs.cmu.edu.
The release area holds compressed tar files with names of the form:
<version>-<machine>_<os>.tar.Z
FTP compressed tar archives in binary mode. To extract, "cd" to the
directory that is to be the root of the tree, then type:
uncompress <file.tar.Z | tar xf - .
As of 2/26/92, the latest SunOS Sparc release is:
15e-sun4c_41.tar.Z (9.3 meg)
The resulting tree is 23 megabytes. For installation directions, see the
section "site initialization" in README file at the root of the tree.
If poor network connections make it difficult to transfer a 10 meg file, the
release is also available split into five parts, with the suffix ".0" to ".4".
To extract from multiple files, use:
cat file.tar.Z.* | uncompress | tar xf - .
The release area also contains source distributions and other binary
distributions. A listing of the current contents of the release area is in
release/FILES. Major release announcements will be made to comp.lang.lisp
until there is enough volume to warrant a comp.lang.lisp.cmu.
Major release announcements will be made to comp.lang.lisp until there is
enough volume to warrant a comp.lang.lisp.cmu.
Source availability:
Lisp and documentation sources are available via anonymous FTP ftp to any CMU
CS machine. [See the README file for FTP instructions and source distribution
information.] All CMU written code is public domain, but CMU CL also makes use
of several imported packages: PCL, CLX and XP. Although these packages are
copyrighted, they may be freely distributed without any licensing agreement or
fee.
The release area contains a source distribution, which is an image of all the
".lisp" source files used to build version 15e:
15e-source.tar.Z (3.6 meg)