From: Patrick D. Logan
Subject: Re: Experience with Lisp on MS Windows?
Date: 
Message-ID: <pdlogan.28.00090C08@ccm.jf.intel.com>
In article <·················@netcom.com> ·······@netcom.com (Jim Fehrle) writes:

>Does anyone have experience with Allegro CL/PC or Goldhill GCLISP for
>Microsoft Windows?  I'm about to buy a package, I'd appreciate comments based
>on first-hand experience.  If you've used both, do you prefer one over the
>other and why?  Are there other packages I should look into?

I can recommend ACL/PC. I have used it to develop several Windows GUI apps. It 
performs reasonably on my home 486sx with just four MB and it performs great 
on my 16 MB 486 at work. Stand-alone app building is easy as ABC. High-level 
UI interface is easy to use too, though CLIM would be neat. It's not quite 
CLtL II nor ANSI. It is sort of CLtL I++. For example, it would be neat to 
have the condition system. For developing GUIs it generates fine code.

From: Kaelin Colclasure
Subject: Re: Experience with Lisp on MS Windows?
Date: 
Message-ID: <KAELIN.94May31201115@ignatz.bridge.com>
In article <···················@ccm.jf.intel.com> ·······@ccm.jf.intel.com (Patrick D. Logan) writes:

   I can recommend ACL/PC. I have used it to develop several Windows GUI apps. It 
   performs reasonably on my home 486sx with just four MB and it performs great 
   on my 16 MB 486 at work. Stand-alone app building is easy as ABC. High-level 
   UI interface is easy to use too, though CLIM would be neat. It's not quite 
   CLtL II nor ANSI. It is sort of CLtL I++. For example, it would be neat to 
   have the condition system. For developing GUIs it generates fine code.

Could you pass along the executable sizes of the applications which
you've developed?  I'm well aware that they're "meaningless," but I'd
like to know if anything < 1MB in size is possible with Allegro CL/PC.
I'm not an Allegro user, but I'd like to be.  Problem is, any
executable that can't be delivered on one (uncompressed) 3.5" floppy
disk is considered "too fat" by configuration management...
--
// Kaelin Colclasure ---------------------------------------------------------
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From: Patrick D. Logan
Subject: Re: Experience with Lisp on MS Windows?
Date: 
Message-ID: <pdlogan.29.000AA272@ccm.jf.intel.com>
In article <····················@ignatz.bridge.com> ······@bridge.com (Kaelin Colclasure) writes:

>In article <···················@ccm.jf.intel.com> ·······@ccm.jf.intel.com (Patrick D. Logan) writes:

>   I can recommend ACL/PC.

>Could you pass along the executable sizes of the applications which
>you've developed?  I'm well aware that they're "meaningless," but I'd
>like to know if anything < 1MB in size is possible with Allegro CL/PC.
>I'm not an Allegro user, but I'd like to be.  Problem is, any
>executable that can't be delivered on one (uncompressed) 3.5" floppy
>disk is considered "too fat" by configuration management...

My smallest app is something like 1.5MB, but I haven't worked hard at trying 
to make any of them small. This app has a couple of multi-select lists boxes, 
a check box, and several push buttons. It gets a file with the file chooser, 
parses the file using some sequence functions, puts some items in one list 
box, others in the second. It does some matching using strings, lists, and 
sequence functions and moves things between the two lists boxes. Finally it 
writes information to a .INI file using the Win3.1 API.

In the app-builder tool you can specify what components to leave out: various 
CLOS-isms, format, read, etc. I have never bothered to do this, even as an 
experiment! I guess I have enough disk space and performance is such that it 
doesn't matter to me. No one has ever complained, but these aren't commercial 
apps either. Contact Franz for more information. I found them helpful when I 
was considering ACL/PC in the first place.

···············@ccm.jf.intel.com
(503) 696-9309
From: Martin Rodgers
Subject: Re: Experience with Lisp on MS Windows?
Date: 
Message-ID: <770483811snz@wildcard.demon.co.uk>
In article <····················@ignatz.bridge.com>
           ······@bridge.com "Kaelin Colclasure" writes:

> Could you pass along the executable sizes of the applications which
> you've developed?  I'm well aware that they're "meaningless," but I'd
> like to know if anything < 1MB in size is possible with Allegro CL/PC.
> I'm not an Allegro user, but I'd like to be.  Problem is, any
> executable that can't be delivered on one (uncompressed) 3.5" floppy
> disk is considered "too fat" by configuration management...

Ouch. It's ironic that so many C++ apps require more than one floppy.
Using MFC adds more than 200K to one of my apps, while the "same" app
without MFC (for DOS) might be smaller than 30K.

Now, try scalling that up a little, assuming that an app written in
Common Lisp will use a large portion of the language. It's all relative.
I've heard of 3 MB Visual Basic apps - compare that to the size of a
"Hello, World" VB example. Don't forget to ignore the VB support overhead,
as that's only 400K, and it's shared by every VB app. :-)

You can play with the figures to prove anything. Reviewers do it all
the time to prove their own prejudices. My favourite example was Ray
Duncan using Actor to write a "Hello, World" example. It reminds me
of one of my favourite quotes from a pop song:

                "Don't believe what you read"
                       The Boomtown Rats
-- 
Martin Rodgers, WKBBG, London UK   AKA "Cyber Surfer"

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